Resources for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)

Analysis: SOX whistleblowers open to retaliation

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Internal accountants and other corporate employees who report financial wrongdoing at their companies may not be able to count on Sarbanes-Oxley Act "whistleblower" provisions to protect them from retaliation.

Although those provisions were inserted into the law by Congress to encourage corporate insiders to step forward and report accounting or securities fraud, a new analysis by researchers at the University of Nebraska College of Law found gaping holes in the SOX whistleblower protections.

Under Section 806 of that law, non-governmental employees were, for the first time, granted federal whistleblower protection for disclosing financial malfeasance that materially affected the stock price of publicly traded companies.

When the law was enacted in 2002, those provisions were hailed as groundbreaking advances in the government's effort to prevent the kind of accounting scandals that led to the collapse of Enron and auditing firm Arthur Andersen.

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