

An End to Sarbanes-Oxley? - chris100
http://blogs.channelinsider.com/secure_channel/content/governance_and_regulatory_compliance/an_end_to_sarbanes-oxley.html

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brc
Get rid of it. It's ridiculous and a cash cow for accounting and audit firms.

Enron et al would not have been prevented with these programs. The crooks who
want to break the law will find a way. Meanwhile everyone else has to pay, and
pay, and pay, and the laws don't stop or catch anyone.

The IPO market is the most visible casualty. But it is a drag on businesses of
all sizes : there is no extra productivity gained in employing an army of
people to go around and check everything ever done. You're paying people to do
effectively nothing, just like Keynes' desire to pay one worker to dig a hole,
and another to fill it up as way of making the economy work. All these people
could be working in productive areas of the economy and increasing wealth for
companies and nations as a whole.

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russell
It would be a good thing too. Sarbanes-Oxley is so onerous that it has killed
the IPO market for small firms. IIRC $3-5M in legal and accounting fees for
the IPO and yearly 7 figure amounts for compliance.

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gstar
Thoroughly agree.

The costs of compliance are only so high because practitioners are supposedly
scarce. The opportunity costs to industry have been much, much higher than the
direct costs, though.

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bediger
Among other things, SarbOx has become a boogey man to scare IT rank-and-file
with. IT managers use SarbOx to deskill IT work.

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lliiffee
Can you elaborate? I have no idea why IT rank-and-file, specifically, would be
scared of SarbOx.

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bediger
Why, specifically? Because they don't know what SarbOx really and truly
demands of them. They only know what the consultant said long ago, and they
know when the PM says they would be "out of compliance" with SarbOx if they
did so-and-so instead of such-and-such.

That's why SarbOx is a boogey man: it's huge, it's legal (rather than
technical) and That Enron Dude Went To Jail because of it.

The nature of boogey men is never made clear, now is it? From Lenin to Mao to
bin Laden, the DoD has its boogey men used to scare Congress into funding more
and better toys. SarbOx is a boogey man in exactly the same way.

