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Compliance: 20+ Years of Sarbanes-Oxley
Sarbanes-Oxley was passed more than twenty years ago, and it has been more than ten years since we’ve discussed it here. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) is a US law created in 2002 after the Enron scandal occurred to improve financial disclosure and prevent account fraud by corporations. The intent was to avoid the possibility of scandals in the future.
It has been twenty years of contentious debate, although the dissenters have gradually given up and resigned to the mandates of the law, and the coverage of it seldom is in the headlines now.
The major complaint about SOX has been that it is very burdensome/expensive for small companies to comply with the control requirements.
Pro-SOX arguments say that the quality and depth of financial auditing have dramatically improved as a result of the law. For example, Mary Jo White, former chair of the SEC, said that “Sarbanes-Oxley is, by far, one of the most important pieces of legislation that has ever happened in the financial securities arena. There has been such great significance in what SOX has done for auditor independence and the integrity of financial statements.”
John Berlau and Josh Rutzick, writing for the Wall Street Journal, said that “twenty years later, legitimate entrepreneurs and ordinary investors are punished by the law’s costly mandates. Sarbanes-Oxley has permanently altered the landscape of business growth and development… Perhaps the most memorable stain on its record is that it failed to catch the mortgage shenanigans that led to the 2008 financial crisis. A 2011 study in the International Journal of Disclosure and Governance found that by focusing on minutiae instead of major errors in valuing assets, Sarbanes-Oxley’s ‘current control-centric approach misses the really big risks.'”
Scott Saks, a corporate partner at Norton Rose Fulbright, said that “You can regulate as much as you want, but if someone wants to commit fraud, they’ll do it. If companies want to get around regulations, they’ll find a way.”
