Most people never met a regulation they didn't like. A growth company you hold stock in found cooking its books? Make it so that no public company can lift its head without establishing absolute financial accountability. Your insurance or health-care provider expose some of your personal information to the public? Demand laws that require every data collector to meet stringent guidelines on storage, security, and handling. Someone unwittingly send you a worm or virus in an E-mail attachment? Push for mandatory courses on security and etiquette for all Net newbies. Hamstring the masses for the sins of a few. We'll worry about the direct and indirect costs later.
When it comes to the mother of all regulations, Sarbanes-Oxley, CEOs of most fast-growing privately held companies like what they see. In a recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 73% of private company CEOs said SOX has done at least a decent job of improving financial governance and transparency for public companies. One in four of those private companies has voluntarily adopted SOX "best practices." So should Sarbanes-Oxley be applied broadly to their companies, not just to public ones, at the state or federal level? Uh, no. That would be overkill, they say. In fact, more than a third of those same CEOs believe that private companies enjoy a competitive advantage over publicly traded companies precisely because they don't have to run the same gauntlet of regulations.
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