Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002: Difference between revisions

{{g}}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]] [[negotiator]]s, [[lawyer]]s, [[compliance officer]]s, [[internal auditor]]s, [[operations]] [[middle manager]]s who, without its loving embrace, might have withered on their benighted [[Japanese knotweed]] vine.