Sarbanes-Oxley 'hurting the US'
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The US needs to rethink its regulation of companies, a group with links to Treasury  Secretary Henry Paulson says.
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TONY EASTLEY: US investors have reacted with caution to a move by media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to shore up his family&#39;s holdings in News Corporation.
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Among the new challenges: keeping Sarbanes-Oxley expenses under control and "their CEOs out of jail."
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Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act mandates a company&#39;s auditor to identify &quot;any material internal control weakness&quot; or &quot;significant deficiency,&quot; in verifying that management has sufficient
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The US tax burden on businesses is much heavier than that in the European Union, driving investors away from US markets, the head of NYSE Euronext, John Thain, said Wednesday.
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Foreign governments trying to impose restraints on popular technologies like Apple's iTunes music store harm the consumer more than protecting him, a top U.S. antitrust official says.
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The independent body charged with setting US accounting standards on Thursday gave hard deadlines for companies to treat stock options as expenses in financial statements.
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A suit brought by the New York Attorney General against UBS, accusing its U.S. brokerage of defrauding customers, could harm the wealth management industry even if the Swiss bank mounts a successful defense, analysts said.
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US stocks were set for more pain on Friday as heightened credit concerns and fresh bad economic news weighed on investor sentiment.
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The stock exchanges in the United States would be forced to tighten their governance and move toward separating their self-policing function from their business operations under a plan proposed by federal regulators on Tuesday.
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The long-awaited interpretation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is the culmination of a fierce lobbying battle between accounting firms and small public companies.
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President Bush expressed displeasure with a government strategy that would have given plaintiffs' lawyers more leeway to sue over corporate fraud, administration officials said yesterday.
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The head of the CBI business lobby, Digby Jones, attacks the US government's 'protectionist' trade policies.
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InfoWorld - SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. -- Between Sarbanes-Oxley and sexual harassment suits, the enterprise is more concerned than ever about what its employees say or send in e-mails and blogs.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. senator has called for the U.S. government to cancel an ongoing purchasing contract with Sun Microsystems Inc., but the company says Senator Chuck Grassley's request is based on bad information. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has repeatedly criticized Sun for allegedly overcharging government agencies while on a government-wide purchasing schedule at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) called a multiple award contract. The GSA's inspector general has accused Sun of overcharging government agencies by more than US$25 million in contracts dating back to June 1997. Grassley, in a letter to the GSA last Friday, asked the agency to cancel Sun's contract. Grassley accused the company of not complying with information requests from the GSA's contracting officer and inspector general. The information was necessary for an audit requested by Grassley, the senator said. "I do not understand why Sun would refuse to cooperate fully with this audit," Grassley wrote to GSA Administrator Lurita Doan. "Why is Sun apparently afraid to open its books for inspection? It makes me wonder: Does Sun have something to hide?" Sun, in a statement released late Monday, said Grassley is "misled" about the company's cooperation with inspectors. The company has responded to "multiple demands" from the inspector general and other agencies, the company said. "Ironically, in the same week the senator accused us of not producing sufficient information [inspector general] officials canceled a meeting to discuss these matters because our document production was so voluminous that they needed additional time to review," Sun said. "We have produced tens of thousands of documents, plus transactional data covering billions of dollars in sales, while being subjected to deadlines that appear to be designed to ensure the demands cannot be met." The questions about Sun's contracts surfaced in September 2004, when the GSA Office of Inspector General received a hotline complaint about the company's pricing, according to March congressional testimony from Inspector General Brian Miller. In July 2005, the GSA told Sun resellers the agency was cancelling Sun's contract, because the company was allegedly charging government customers more than some commercial customers. But Sun avoided a cancellation by agreeing to drop some prices. Sun remains a defendant inÂ an Arkansas lawsuit alleging a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme involving IT vendors'Â work on numerous U.S. government contracts. Sun has accused the GSA's Miller of being biased and prejudiced against the company. Part of the problem, the company says, stems from a conflict between Doan and Miller after Doan questioned the inspector general's auditing tactics. Miller has defended his actions, saying he's doing his job. "The president and Congress sent me here to GSA to root out fraud, waste and abuse and to ensure that GSA programs are run with efficiency, economy, and effectiveness," he said in his March testimony. Doan in August 2005 rushed to keep Sun on the GSA contract even though there were continuing questions about the company's pricing, Miller said in his testimony. Doan was worried GSA's IT contracting division "could be destroyed" without Sun participating, he said. Grassley, in his Friday letter, called on the GSA to give Sun 30 days to comply with audit requests and cancel the contract if the company did not comply. The GSA should follow the lead of its inspector general, who has called for Sun's contract to be cancelled, Grassley said. But Sun, in its statement, said Miller's reports on its contracts "are riddled with inaccuracies and conspicuous omissions of multiple know facts." Grassley and Miller have not attempted to compare Sun's contract to contracts by other IT vendors, the company said. "The only party who would be hurt by a cancellation of the Sun GSA contract is the American taxpayer," Sun said. "Our pricing is very often better than our competitors, and the contract offers the government extremely aggressive discounts and contractual protections." Â
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The stock market cops are going to take some heat today. The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, a collection of business and academic heavy hitters, will release its much-anticipated report, and there isn't much mystery in its principal point of view. Capital markets regulation is a problem. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a reliable target.
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Attorney  Eric J. Sinrod says corporate America needs a wake up call--in the worst way--about data security.