Listen to the bleating of coming from corporate boardrooms and you would think they’re being lead to slaughter. The wailing and knashing of teeth is caused believe it or not by a law that holds the people who run corporations repsonsible for how they’re operated. So what we have is a law that REQUIRES CEO’s to actually know and certify that the what the company is stating in financial records is accurate.
And for that, the CEO’s who for the last several decades have justified their HUGELY obscene paychecks becuase of their great repsonsiblity crying because the government had the audacity to actually hold them responsible.
Business Week puts the average large-company compliance price tag at upward of $35 million. Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, says that the billions spent nationally on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance weighs on the stock market and is like “throwing buckets of sand in the gears of a market economy.”
What market economy is it that simply wants to hold those in authority responsible for the information provided to the public? Any healthy, well run company should have many, if not all the controls in place that are needed for SOX compliance. Complaints about the cost of compliance could possibly be used as an indicator of the general operational integrity of the company.
Just a thought