{"id":805,"date":"2007-06-27T05:35:37","date_gmt":"2007-06-27T10:35:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sequence-inc.com\/fraudfiles\/2007\/06\/27\/more-on-sarbanes-oxley-and-boards-of-directors\/"},"modified":"2007-06-28T23:55:34","modified_gmt":"2007-06-29T04:55:34","slug":"more-on-sarbanes-oxley-and-boards-of-directors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/more-on-sarbanes-oxley-and-boards-of-directors\/","title":{"rendered":"More on Sarbanes-Oxley and boards of directors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I got a mention this week on a blog called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theracetothebottom.org\/home\/\">The Race to the Bottom<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A consistently anti-Sarbanes-Oxley site is The FRAUDFiles Blog.  Last week, for example, the blog noted a study discussing the changes in boards as a result of SOX and the increase in D&amp;O insurance costs.  As the Blog concluded:  &#8220;Clearly there is a one significant cost of SOX noted here &#8211; an increase in the D&amp;O premiums.&#8221;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I tried to like Sarbanes-Oxley. I promise I did.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I just can&#8217;t help but noticing over and over the enormous costs of compliance, and little to no proven decrease in fraud. While I think that companies have made some improvements post-SOX, I think that they came at too high of a cost and that the legislation didn&#8217;t actually require most of those improvements anyway&#8230; so why have the legislation? Add to that the false sense of security that SOX seems to have given users of financial statements, and we&#8217;ve got ourselves a bad situation.<\/p>\n<p>Admirably, J. Robert Brown at The Race to the Bottom took a much better look at the study I referenced in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sequence-inc.com\/fraudfiles\/2007\/06\/22\/the-effect-of-sarbanes-oxley-on-boards-of-directors\/\">my initial post<\/a> on this topic. A couple of the interesting points that Mr. Brown highlighted:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>Boards have become larger and more &#8220;independent.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>The number of companies adding at least one director to the audit committee have increased from 18.09% in 1999 to 36.16% in 2004.  One can surmise that a good part of this increase arose from the need for a financial expert on the audit committee.<\/li>\n<li>While there was no material change in the number of board meetings as a whole in the post-SOX world, audit committee meetings doubled.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m still left wondering, however, whether any of these &#8220;improvements&#8221; has really helped curb corporate fraud?  <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/tracy\" rel=\"tag\"><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/coenen\" rel=\"tag\"><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/tracy+coenen\" rel=\"tag\"><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/tracy+l+coenen\" rel=\"tag\"><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/sarbanes\" rel=\"tag\"><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/sarbanes+oxley\" rel=\"tag\"><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/sox\" rel=\"tag\"><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/fraud\" rel=\"tag\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got a mention this week on a blog called The Race to the Bottom: A consistently anti-Sarbanes-Oxley site is The FRAUDFiles Blog. Last week, for example, the blog noted a study discussing the changes in boards as a result [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fraud-news-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-cZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}