Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002

Congress, U. S. (2002). Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Type

Report

Intellectual base

Grey literature

Year

2002

Link

https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/3763

Cited from

law_governance, philosophy, public_administration_policy

Cited by

8 citations across 8 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Certification
  • The hard-won lessons of auditor-independence reform — that the certifier's incentive must not depend on the certifiee's approval — port from financial audit to rating-agency oversight, and onward to any setting where a paid evaluator attests to a paying party, including review and rating systems generally.

    This sourceReforms auditor independence (limits on the audited company funding the auditor, mandatory partner rotation), the canonical response to captured attestation where the certifiee pays the certifier.

• Editorial Independence
  • Audit and assurance: external auditors barred from consulting with the auditee, mandatory rotation, and audit committees insulated from management, as under Sarbanes-Oxley and PCAOB regimes.

    This sourceEstablishes auditor-independence rules — bars on consulting for audit clients, mandatory partner rotation, and audit committees of independent directors who appoint the auditor.

• Journalistic Objectivity
  • Audit and assurance. Auditor independence from the audited firm, rotation requirements, prohibition on non-audit services to audit clients, and oversight inspection of the auditors themselves.

    This sourceTitle II codifies auditor independence — prohibition on non-audit services to audit clients, audit-partner rotation, audit-committee pre-approval, and PCAOB oversight of auditors — converting structural distance from the audited firm into a binding constraint.

• Transparency
  • T1: Transparency scope versus legitimate secrecy.

    This sourceEnacted in response to the Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco accounting scandals; mandates CEO/CFO certification of financial statements (§ 302), internal-controls attestation (§ 404), enhanced disclosure of off-balance-sheet transactions, and auditor-independence rules under PCAOB oversight — the principal modern US statute calibrating corporate-disclosure scope against legitimate confidentiality interests.

Mechanisms

• Access Recertification
  • This periodic user-access review is the pattern that Sarbanes-Oxley controls made routine in enterprises.
• Anonymous Reporting
  • A useful legal anchor here is the confidential-and-anonymous submission procedure that Sarbanes-Oxley requires of audit committees

    This sourceRequires audit committees to establish procedures for receiving, retaining, treating, and accepting confidential anonymous employee concerns about accounting or auditing.

• Audit Committee
  • This independence is why regulators mandate it: post-Enron, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act required listed-company audit committees to be composed of independent directors and to hold direct authority over the external auditor, precisely so assurance would not report to the management it assures.
• Compliance Signoff
  • … evidence — the results of control tests, reconciliations, and the list of any control failures found during the quarter — and the CFO and CEO sign the attestation that internal controls over financial reporting operated effectively, a certification that Sarbanes-Oxley makes a personal, legal obligation of the signers.

Verification

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 3 other ways.

• https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/PLAW-107publ204 ×1
• https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-107publ204/html/PLAW-107publ204.htm ×1
• https://www.govinfo.gov/link/plaw/107/public/204 ×1

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