Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002

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Sulphur dioxide is a toxic gas with a pungent, irritating smell. Irritating, but not tedious, exactly. Its chemical formulation is not SOX, but SO₂.

SOX, by contrast, is the equally noxious, just as irritating, and quite a bit more tedious Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a pungent piece of US consumer protection legislation introduced as a knee-jerk reaction to a number of major corporate and accounting scandals, including Enron and WorldCom in the early part of the millennium. This is not to downplay the gravity of those scandals a little bit — rotten apples gonna rot, and all — just to query whether imposing a colossal bureaucratic superstructure on all apples, rotten or otherwise, was really the most effective way of addressing them.

If Enron is the horse, oblivion the paddock to which it bolted and the executive branch of the US government the stable, then Sarbanes-Oxley is the door, hanging woozily off its hinges.

On the bright side, its shadow has provided lucrative employment for an army of Golgafrinchan negotiators, lawyers, compliance officers, internal auditors, operations middle managers who, without its loving embrace, might have withered on their benighted Japanese knotweed vine.