> Now to this: > >Seeing this post made me wonder how other companies productivity has > >changed since SOX. We are going to have to hire people to do jobs that did > >not exist before. Programming changes that used to take less than a day > >usually cannot be done now in that time frame. In order to get the proper > >signoffs from the business, stuff sits and waits now. Our auditors are > >insisting that we have one person on the business side that makes sure all > >signoffs are done before anything goes into production. > > This is a topic that fascinates me. Every week smaller traded companies are > 'de-listing' and 'going dark' because of SOX. (Hmm, is that what we were > going for?) Then there's the ones that charged on and found that they had > grossly underestimated the requirement and the cost. There is a raging > debate about how much is too much and whether we have dealt the corporate > world a fatal blow. In my personal opinion we had to do what we've done.
Are you sure? Unfortunately, the USA (and us as well) suffer badly from NIH. An accounting disaster on the scale of Enron is almost incomprehensible in Europe. Yes we've had some pretty bad Enron-scale foul-ups, but they've *easily* been confirmed as fraud (eg Maxwell) or incompetence (Marconi/General Electric (not your one)). And a lot of companies in Europe were in quite a mess because SOX was *illegal* under European law, but some joint-listed companies can't pull their listings from the US stock exchanges (some rule about compulsory listing if you have more than so many US shareholders - so it's actually possible for a European company to be forced to comply with US listing rules because Americans have bought on the European Bourses!) The two things that would (and have) prevented an Enron-style disaster here are the rules that say "if you have a controlling interest (50% or more) then you are financially responsible for your subsidiary" - I was shocked to discover that the US figure above which you have to take responsibility is 97%! And the chairman/board/whoever has a somewhat vague responsibility to confirm that the accounts are a fair representation of the state of the company. In other words, if you know of accounting shenanigans you can't sign ... It's interpreted fairly strictly, and auditors have been known to be clobbered by it, too. I think SOX is damaging, precisely because it is OTT, and from what I've heard about comparing it to European practices, I gather it's probably not that effective, either! Cheers, Wol ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
