Sarbanes-Oxley Seen As Obstacle In Using Public Data To Monitor Competitive Intelligence

Despite the current regulatory scrutiny in the broker community, insurance companies appear to embrace the intermediaries when gathering legal and ethical "competitive intelligence" on their marketplace rivals. But one CI expert warns of potential roadblocks ahead for both U.S. and international companies, stemming from the enormous cost of complying with the federal Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which ultimately may make it harder to use public sources to monitor publicly held competitors' activities.

"The press loves to link CI with corporate espionage, with spying," said Ken Sawka, a principal at Outward Insights LLC, a Burlington, Mass.-based competitive intelligence firm. There have been a few cases in which companies illegally acquired proprietary documents, "but 99.9% of competitive intelligence activity is not that," Sawka said.

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