Goodbye to Reforms of 2002 (killing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act)

[Blue_Tires]

It took just five weeks after the WorldCom accounting scandal erupted in 2002 for Congress to pass, and President George W. Bush to sign, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. That law required public companies to make sure their internal controls against fraud were not full of holes.

It took three more years for Bernard Ebbers, the man who built WorldCom into a giant, to be sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in the fraud.

Mr. Ebbers will be 85 years old before he is eligible for release from prison. He may be freed, however, before the law is ever enforced on the vast majority of American companies. A Congressional committee voted this week to repeal a crucial part of the law. Other parts are also under attack.

Sarbanes-Oxley was passed, almost unanimously, by a Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-controlled Senate. Now a Democratic Congress is gutting it with the apparent approval of the Obama administration.

The House Financial Services Committee this week approved an amendment to the Investor Protection Act of 2009 — a name George Orwell would appreciate — to allow most companies to never comply with the law, and mandating a study to see whether it would be a good idea to exempt additional ones as well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/business/06norris.htm...

[dflprincess]

1. Remember the line from "Planes, Trains & Automobiles"?

"You're going the wrong way!" I think it applies here.

[smoogatz]

2. Time to dump Geithner.

Einstein said, "we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." The obvious correlation is that in most cases the people who caused the problems through errors in thinking (or just plain old greed) are unlikely to be able to think their way out of them any time soon.

[JustAnotherGen]

3. I'm sick

Fiduciary Responsibility? Where is it?

I'm a former Double Crossing aka Glotanic aka Global Crossing Employee. It wasn't just MCI that tanked due to the greed, the line swaps, the 'deliberately don't bill memos' floating around the companies. There were 4 huge 'tankings' that happened at the same time. TWO of them were Telecom busts. And with the changes that LTE has in store - and how the 'Big 3' can Win Big with LTE????

I dunno - just from the hell and havoc MCI and the Glotanic brought down on this economy? I.E. The Telecom Record. This is just plain flat out stupid.


- Signed

Telecom Product Manager at one of the Big Three Wireless Companies. The one associated with Wire Tapping.

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. It mustn't have been "bust", but they "fixed" it anyway.