Eight years ago on this this glorious day, the ‘Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act’ (in the Senate) and ‘Corporate and Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act’ (in the House) came together to bring us Sarbanes-Oxley.
Most of you didn’t realize it at the time but this particular piece of legislation created thousands of new jobs at Big 4 firms, only to find those people out on their asses a few years later. Oh, well. Luckily, there are plenty of options with you holders of the accounting degree.
We perused the SOx Wikipedia page to find out some things worth noting:
• The final version passed the House 423-3 – Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Ron Paul (R-TX) were two of the three voting ‘nay,’ but Flake and Paul pretty much vote against everything.
• It passed the Senate 99-0 but our friend Jim Peterson has said, “the inability of Sarbox to reach global-scale problems shows the futility of legislation so politically anodyne that it passed the US Senate [unanimously].”
• GWB called SOx, “the most far-reaching reforms of American business practices since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” This, many will argue, has now been trumped.
• The PCAOB! If it wasn’t for Sarbanes-Oxley, there would be no PCAOB. Well, and some recent help from the SCOTUS.
Anyway, we’ve probably said enough. If you have fond wishes or memories of Sarbanes-Oxley that have transpired over the last eight years, cut loose in the comments.