The Benefits of Sarbanes-Oxley and Corporate Governance Measured Against the Costs PDF Download

Author: Salim Motala
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) is the only legislated corporate governance structure, and is aimed at increasing investor confidence in public companies by forcing them to be transparent in their financial affairs. In order for companies to comply with the legislation, significant costs need to be incurred without any guarantee that the benefits will accrue to the investors or the company. The legislation will be regarded as being successful if a) the benefits and costs can be identified and b) the benefits exceed the costs. This study reviews the SOX legislation elements using documentary and secondary interview research, and reveals a convergence between the two. While the purpose of the regulation is to prevent fraud and restore investor confidence, there was no empirical evidence suggesting that investor confidence has increased after complying with the legislation. The benefits of complying with the legislation appear to be access to capital markets in the United States, and awareness of the controls environment by all employees. The costs incurred are listed as initial implementation costs and ongoing sustainable costs, and the overall costs are greater than benefits obtained. In the long term, benefits should exceed the costs, as the sustainable costs are low compared to implementation costs.

Author: Michael F. Holt
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
ISBN: 0080554601
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
The Sarbannes-Oxley Act (SOX) is a mandatory requirement for all listed corporations in the US, whether foreign or not. Compliance is not an option. Other countries are developing similar legislation so the books value is international in scope. SOX is a hot topic and the effects are just beginning to be felt world-wide. This new book goes beyond the implementation phase of SOX and looks at the reaction to the Act in terms of costs, benefits and business impacts. This book is for Senior Managers in the Business and Financial/Accounting Communities who want/need to know what the reaction of business and government is to the SOX legislation, what it is costing and how the effects are penetrating through the business environment. Mike Holt presents a comprehensive review of the impact that Sarbanes-Oxley legislation has had on business, the financial community, governments and the public since its inception in 2002. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has been somewhat successful, but not completely and the cost (well over a trillion dollars) might be considered too high a price to pay for the gains. This book takes a hard look at the costs, benefits and other impacts as well as at what influential and prominent financial, government and business leaders think about it now. * International in scope and content and including interviews with prominent business leaders, CEOs and CFOs of large and small corporations. * Compliance with The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is now mandatory for every listed US corporation and overseas corporations listed on US stock markets. * Covers the reaction of business and government to this legislation, what it is costing and how the effects are penetrating through the business environment.

Author: J. Robert Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) was adopted in a rush, political expediency necessitating that something be done before the 2002 election to minimize voter backlash from the collapse of Enron and WorldCom. Despite the rush, the Act contained a number of improvements on the current state of regulation, including a separation of accounting and consulting services, increase in the strength and independence of the audit committee, certification of financial statements by top officers, and assessment of internal controls by managers and auditors. Nonetheless, SOX engendered an immediate cascade of criticism, much of the excoriation coming from the Academy, especially those adhering to the view that a corporation was a nexus of contracts. For them, the Act fixed non-existent problems, generated costs that exceeded benefits, and relied on approaches that took no notice of definitive economic data; quack corporate governance in a phrase.While SOX suffered from uneven craftsmanship and was not fully vetted in the traditional manner, this did not entirely explain the immediacy and strength of the vituperative attacks. Instead, the Act amounted to an affront, indeed a rejection, of the view within the Academy that corporations were a nexus of contracts and that the evolution of corporate law was a race to the top. In fact, SOX appears to have generated improvements in the corporate governance process. As to whether the costs of some provisions outweigh the benefits, definitive empirical data on the subject remains to be developed.

Author: Paul Ali
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 0471788422
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
"The Sabanes-Oxley Act has been one of the most significant developments in corporate and securities regulation since the New Deal. This collection of important articles would be a valuable resource for anyone seeking to understand Sabanes-Oxley's far-reaching effects on corporate governance in the United States and elsewhere." —Jesse Fried, coauthor of Pay Without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation and Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley "The editors have assembled the latest cutting-edge research on international corporate governance by respected academics in this field. In this handbook, the editors deal with all aspects of the significant legislative changes to corporate governance regulation. It introduces the reader to the new rules that will certainly improve the reliability and the accuracy of disclosures made by corporations. The book comes at the right moment with the recent scandals such as Enron, which will educate all readers especially shareholders of corporate stock." —Komlan Sedzro, Professor of Finance, University of Quebec at Montreal "Today, corporate governance is a topic at the center of public policy debate in most industrialized countries. The range of concerns; the variety of approaches; and their tendency to converge in some areas or diverge in others (not always in the right directions) are emphatically demonstrated by these essays. There is material here of enormous interest for scholars of comparative law and economic regulation. And significantly, the presentation of essays from legal, financial, and regulatory viewpoints demonstrates the growing practical as well as theoretical utility of interdisciplinary work in this area. Professors Ali and Gregoriou are to be warmly congratulated for their skill and initiative in assembling an important publication, as well as for their own contributions to interdisciplinary scholarship." —R. P. Austin, BA, LLM (Sydney), DPhil (Oxon), Supreme Court of New South Wales "This very international collection emphasizes the economic line of descent, while including legal and socio-legal contributions. It fills a very important gap in our empirical knowledge of corporate governance. It is accessible and comprehensive and will greatly assist readers from all relevant disciplines, who are trying to discern the shape of corporate governance as a mature field." —Dimity Kingsford Smith, Professor of Law, University of New South Wales

Author: Susan M. Gates
Publisher: Rand Corporation
ISBN: 0833043951
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
What are the differential effects of regulation and policy on small businesses? What is the impact of special regulatory treatment for small businesses? This book sheds light on these issues through analysis of the regulatory and public policy environment with regard to small businesses, including focused studies in four key areas: health insurance, workplace safety, corporate governance, and business organization.

Author: Scott Miller
Publisher: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing
ISBN: 9783838320649
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Although significant attention has been given to the costs associated with SOX there is no notable research examining the benefits derived therefrom. The purpose of this research is to draw upon the long established stream of agency theory literature to fill the void in the current literature and complement its focus on costs with a serious investigation into whether benefits are being realized from this legislation. Investigating domestic, manufacturing firms listed on the New York Stock Exchange, this research concludes that many governance controls long held to temper agency conflict did not do so in a pre-SOX environment. However, it illustrates that SOX caused these governance mechanisms to effectively moderate agency conflict in a post-SOX environment for this sample. Additionally, it concludes that in a model that includes audit fees, SOX improved the effectiveness of these governance mechanisms in the reduction of agency costs more predominantly with more robust results. Therefore, this research is the first to provide evidence that there are measurable benefits that flow from the passage of SOX.

Author: Nicholas V. Vakkur
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118496310
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Why U.S. corporate governance regulation has lost its way, and what must be done to improve it Modern history persuasively demonstrates the inexorable link that binds comprehensive regulation to the global economy. This important book, rather than simply recount a litany of corporate governance failures, persuasively explains why, despite policymakers' best intentions, regulation has failed in the modern era. An objective study intended for a diverse readership, Corporate Governance Regulation unveils the underlying, root causes of regulatory failure. The result: A compelling and original analysis, broadly suited for a global audience of all backgrounds. Written by published, subject-area experts, the authors carefully delineate how U.S. corporate governance regulation, beginning with Sarbanes Oxley, lacks an adequate rational basis, as may be attributed to a non-existent policy dialogue The witnessed result: A conspicuous lack of regulatory efficacy, enormous costs, coupled with paltry benefits The focus is upon reigniting a stalled, non-productive policy dialogue, by eschewing stale, overly-polemicized arguments, as needed to develop a common ground Drawing from an eclectic, analytic framework, governance experts Nicholas Vakkur and Zulma Herrera offer both the professional and global citizen alike a multi-dimensional understanding of issues critical to global economic health. Nuanced and persuasively argued, Corporate Governance Regulation represents a formidable catalyst in the elusive, ongoing quest for global economic stability.

Author: David Larcker
Publisher: FT Press
ISBN: 0132367076
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Corporate Governance Matters gives corporate board members, officers, directors, and other stakeholders the full spectrum of knowledge they need to implement and sustain superior governance. Authored by two leading experts, this comprehensive reference thoroughly addresses every component of governance. The authors carefully synthesize current academic and professional research, summarizing what is known, what is unknown, and where the evidence remains inconclusive. Along the way, they illuminate many key topics overlooked in previous books on the subject. Coverage includes: International corporate governance. Compensation, equity ownership, incentives, and the labor market for CEOs. Optimal board structure, tradeoffs, and consequences. Governance, organizational strategy, business models, and risk management. Succession planning. Financial reporting and external audit. The market for corporate control. Roles of institutional and activist shareholders. Governance ratings. The authors offer models and frameworks demonstrating how the components of governance fit together, with concrete examples illustrating key points. Throughout, their balanced approach is focused strictly on two goals: to “get the story straight,” and to provide useful tools for making better, more informed decisions.

Author: Janine Noelle Black
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of July 2002 was created to address the financial malfeasance revealed during the investigations of several large firms by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Act required public companies traded on U.S. exchanges to provide increased transparency in financial statements. Key portions of the legislation required firms to create internal financial controls and placed personal accountability with top executives. SOX mandated and standardized a greater degree of self-regulation. In the years following SOX, firms experienced significantly higher compliance costs, but they also benefited from the reduction of statement errors and fraud, increased accuracy in reporting, and greater investor confidence. After the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002, anecdotal evidence suggested that SOX impeded small, research intensive firms. We looked at research intensive firms going public before and after SOX to determine if there was a change in volume and quality of research intensive firms post-SOX. We found that firms that went public after SOX were fewer and had lower patenting activity. In the case of small and medium size firms, the cost of SOX compliance is likely to divert funds from research investments. We speculate that highly research intensive firms are more likely post-SOX to divert their IPO to non-U.S. exchanges, delay going public, or dismiss the idea of going public, as proposed in a "3Ds" model. The 2002 SOX US Congressional Act levied millions of dollars in new compliance costs on each foreign or domestic firm that went public on U.S. exchanges. Funding for regulatory expenditures must come from somewhere. We proposed that one likely candidate was research budgets, as research efforts have a more distant, less immediately visible, long term effect on firm performance. We suggested that large firms more easily absorbed the additional costs of SOX with a reduced effect on research and development budgets, while small firms were less able to maintain research budgets after SOX. In the aftermath of SOX, research spending did go down, most visibly in Biotech and Electronics. As the total number of IPO firms decreased dramatically after SOX, these two research intensive industries, plus Computer Software, were the only industries with a large enough sample size to evaluate. We saw that research intensive firms diminished dramatically, along with many non-research intensive firms, from IPO events after SOX. Where we had sufficient sample size, in computer software, biotechnology, electronics, and "other", we noted that research-intensive firms generally resisted the temptation to raid research budgets, finding funding for compliance elsewhere within the company or from the additional cash flow at time of IPO. Where firms did appear to greatly reduce research budgets was in the non-research intensive industries, where research budgets might be more of a discretionary expense. Firm size was not a factor in whether research intensive firms could better absorb the costs of SOX, although smaller firms tended to spend proportionally more on research in an effort to grow faster. After the enactment of SOX, we observed an indication that the markets valued research intensity even more than prior to SOX, perhaps understanding the vulnerability of research budgets being diverted to compliance costs. Overall, the data suggested that the effect of SOX was underestimated in this study, as the firms that were deterred from going public on U.S. exchanges were not in the sample evaluated. We only analyzed those firms prepared to accept the higher costs of SOX. The data set consisted of survivors, selected firms still willing to pay for SOX compliance as well as for research programs.

Author: Andreas Bauer
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640106318
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description
Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Law, grade: 1,3, IPAG Ecole Supérieure de Commerce Nice, course: Financial Management, language: English, abstract: This paper provides a brief but complete introduction of the Sarbanes- Oxley Act (SOX). After providing the aims that were pursed by the United States legislation by introducing this act, the paper gives an overview of the provisions of the Sarbanes- Oxley Act. This overview deals with every single provision and describes the inherent measures. Ultimately the last section of this paper delivers an overview of the criticism raised by different scholars and experts concerning the Sarbanes- Oxley Act.