Sarbanes-Oxley - 3 years on

This is the year when the curse of Enron really strikes and companies have to comply with the mass of regulations that was put together in the post-Enron crisis. Its high point is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Neither Paul Sarbanes, nor Mike Oxley the two legislators who coproduced the Act could have imagined the outcome of their product. It has spawned a huge industry in their name, that companies are spending $5 million each to comply with the requirements, the relatively brief legislation has been expanded to hundreds of thousands of words and there is a whole class of auditors and lawyers who are earning millions in interpreting or rather misinterpreting what they have intended. Neither would have imagined that the accounting companies whose powers they wished to clip because of their involvement in corporate history’s biggest scandals would profit so hugely from this legislation and double their income from its implementation.

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