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Wednesday, November 4, 2009
NJ reps gut US law to 'help business' - or 'weaken reform'

After winning a 37-32 vote in the US House Financial Services Committee to prevent a Sarbanes-Oxley Act rule, forcing firms to disclose their internal financial controls, from applying to public companies worth less than $75 million, the bipartisan suburban duo of US Rep. John Adler, D-NJ, and Scott Garrett, R-NJ, are collecting both fame and scorn.

The vote was cheered by Mark Heesen, head of the National Venture Capital Association, on his visit to the Inquirer today. In a public statement, Adler bragged the bill frees small business from the threat of "prohibitive regulations" and will "help create jobs and spur economic growth".

By contrast, the Consumer Federation of America and investors' and accountants' groups cried "Sellout!" 

Adler and Garrett would "weaken protections against accounting fraud at roughly half of public companies," the CFA complained. Congres is "rolling back existing transparency and accountability... Amazingly, after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,"  thy're "roll(ing) back what few effective protections investors already have by weakening refomrs put in place after the Enron collapse."

John McLaughlin, senior managing director at business adviser and accounting firm Smart & Co., Devon, notes a recent Public Company Accounting Oversight Board review of small-company financial reports reviewed by big accounting firms, seven years after Sarbanes-Oxley was passed, "continue(d) to find deficiencies in important audit areas including revenue recognition, management's estimates, income taxes and fair value of financial instruments including derivative instruments, loans and securities." McLaughlin says this shows weak "quality" at some companies "regarding public reporting and disclosure."

 

 

Posted by Joseph N. DiStefano @ 4:13 PM  Permalink | 2 comments
Comments   
Posted 05:34 PM, 11/04/2009
fafafooey
Sarbanes-Oxley was a knee-jerk reaction by Congress that just turned big consulting bux for the big accounting firms and and a jobs program for CPA candidates who get stuck doing the auditing.
Posted 09:51 PM, 11/04/2009
mktstrfinancial
Sarbanes-Oxley should be repealed and a bill making executives criminally responsible for corporate fraud should be passed. What we also need is government pension regulation. Government pensions (federal, state, teacher, municipal) should be pooled into a Federally managed fund which would not project hypothetical 8% returns to calculate funding requirements but would instead be invested exclusively in agency and agency backed debt eliminating the hundreds of billions of dollars paid to managers in the last decade for generally worse than index returns.
2 comments
About Joseph N. DiStefano
Joseph N. DiStefano writes this blog to feed his PhillyDeals column, which is printed in the business pages of The Philadelphia Inquirer every Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Joe has worked at the Inquirer, mostly, since 1988. He has also written for Bloomberg and Gannett, authored the book Comcasted, majored in economics at Penn, and fathered six children. Reach Joe at 215-854-5194 and JoeD@phillynews.com

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