SOX Center

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 Dec. 15 deadline for small public companies to comply with provisions that critics say are too costly and time-consuming. That means small public companies will have to follow the complex Sarbanes-Oxley rules, which require an annual evaluation of the effectiveness of internal controls, for fiscal years that end after that date.

“We feel at this point it’s full throttle ahead to get us fully compliant by the end of the year,” said Wayne Lipschitz, chief financial officer and vice president of finance for Brentwood-based Grill Concepts Inc., which owns and manages the Daily Grill and Grill on the Alley restaurants.

Small public companies are defined as those whose market value — the price of their stock multiplied by the number of their shares outstanding — is less than $75 million. Grill Concepts has a market value of about $45 million.

latimes.com: Sarbanes-Oxley: No more delays

More companies are going private to avoid headaches of stricter governance rules and quarterly reviews by Wall Street

After 45 years in accounting for public companies, Sonny Durham is relieved he now works for a private concern.

Durham, former chief financial officer of Sunair Electronics, put together the transaction that took private the once publicly held radio communications business with headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. “I was personally glad for the opportunity to get out of the public arena. For a small business, it was becoming very demanding,” he said.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the post-Enron law that placed new auditing and governance requirements on companies, has been blamed for many departures from the public market. At Sunair, for example, a tightening budget made it more difficult to add the staff needed to comply with federal reporting requirements, said Durham, who is part of the management team that took the business private.

Sun-Sentinel: A timely exit for many publicly held companies