SOX Center

(Bloomberg) — The U.S. House of Representatives moved toward giving small companies an additional year to adhere to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s accounting rules, which are being revised by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
House lawmakers voted 267 to 154 to delay a deadline for companies with less than $75 million in publicly available shares to start […]

 Grilling the assembled members of the Securities and Exchange Commission about Sarbanes-Oxley, Barney Frank just took the time to note “I feel compelled by the spirit of bipartisanship to come to the defense of the Republican president and the Republican Congress that passed [Sarbanes-Oxley].”
CFO.com: SEC: No Help Needed from Congress

Roger Ehrenberg submits: I feared this day would come. And it’s here. No, not just the saber-rattling and moaning about how hedge fund and private equity-types are too rich, how hedge funds are increasing investor risks and debt buyers are accepting overly-liberal terms fueling the private equity juggernaut and the like.
But a newly-energized Democratic Congress […]

Commissioners of the government’s watchdog for Wall Street will face questions about their efforts to protect investors and oversee markets during a House hearing on Tuesday.
Members of the House Financial Services Committee will line up Tuesday afternoon to ask Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox and the four other SEC commissioners about the agency’s […]

Two separate oversight bodies responsible for financial reporting and auditing rules under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)–the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board–took steps in late May to streamline and clarify the act’s requirements.
On May 23, the SEC approved new guidelines for interpreting section 404 of SOX, instructing companies to focus […]

Jack Ciesielski submits: CFO.com reports that Senators John Kerry (Massachusetts) and Olympia Snowe (Maine) have sent another letter to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox requesting further delay in the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s Section 404 for small companies.
It’s deja vu all over again: they sent a letter to him last February on the same subject.
Here’s […]

The two top members of the House Small Business Committee asked regulators on Monday how much newly approved revisions to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act would save small companies, with the panel’s chairwoman saying a hearing about the law last week yielded only promises, not estimates.
In letters to Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox and Public […]

Almost three-quarters of the chief financial officers in the US believe that Sarbanes-Oxley should be “repealed or reformed” as the costs of the 2002 compliance law have outweighed the benefits, according to a survey.
The findings underscore the scale of frustration over the costs associated with implementing “Sarbox”, even as regulators said that costs were expected […]

John Kerry and Olympia Snowe want another delay for small companies.
Senators John Kerry and Olympia Snowe have sent another letter to Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox asking him to give small companies more time to prepare for complying with the internal-control provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
The small-business committees in both the House and […]

With the SEC holding to its Dec. 15 deadline for compliance, companies will be scrambling.
Time’s up!
That’s the message for small public companies from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which met recently to give final approval to new guidelines and amendments to the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform law.
The five-member commission didn’t include a hoped-for extension of the […]