Sarbanes-Oxley in Retrospect: SOX Comes of Age

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  dallasmick07/14/08 Report as spam
  1

  Sabox: Y2K2

  I have read the various descriptions of the 'new' Sarbox requirements. They basically are an attempt at holding the CEO and CFO accountable for the documents that they sign. Funny, I would have thought that their signature all along carried the same weight.
  
  The most costly element is the outside audit certifying that the reporting requirement has been met.
  
  Wonder how many accounting firms lobbied for the inclusion that that provision?
  
  I also think that IT departments "piled on" to the fear factor of Sarbox. It was the new Y2K, a new excuse to ask for millions of dollars in new IT infrastructure, NONE of which was implicated in the law's reporting or process standards. IMHO, all of the Sarbox requirements could have been enabled by manual process changes.

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  sbrennaman35407/16/08 Report as spam
  2

  SARBOX: Y2K

  The large audit firms and the associations they foster are some of the biggest lobbyist groups on Capital Hill so you are right, no big surprise that the external auditing requirement was included in the bill. As far as signatory responsibility, the documents today carry no more weight than they did before. Except now to fraudulently sign is a class A federal felony. That is a motivator and accomplishes what Reg FD (Full disclosure) was supposed to do.