Resources for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)

Does Oxley See Sarbox Relevance to Subprime Mortgage Mess?

www.banktech.com

t was too bad that Michael Oxley, former U.S. congressman, co-author of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and currently Vice Chairman of the NASDAQ and Advocate for Corporate Accountability, didn't take any questions after his keynote presentation Monday to kick off Gartner's Financial Services Technology Summit 2007, which wraps up today in New York City. If he had there probably would have been some interesting queries about the mushrooming subprime mortgage mess and how things could have gotten so bad, when Sarbanes-Oxley was intended to improve corporate governance.

Oxley's comments were fairly interesting as far as they went (over the years I've heard many politicians say a heck of a lot less at other financial services conferences). He talked about "the crisis in confidence and loss of trust" that was pervasive -– especially in the capital markets -– in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom failures. This crisis was made more dramatic not just because of the huge amount of money at stake -– "$8 trillion in market cap was lost" as a result of the various corporate meltdowns of the early 2000s, according to Oxley -– but also because of what he described as "the democratization of the capital markets," meaning that it was "average" citizens, not just Wall Street traders or other investment professionals, who were affected (and let their elected officials know about it).

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