SarBox Changes: Be Still, My (Nevertheless Troubled) Heart
From Investment News (paid subscription required):
‘Significant changes’ for SOX, says Cox
By Riva Froymovich
November 17, 2006Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox said he “will unveil significant changes” in the Sarbanes-Oxley law, according to published reports.
In a speech yesterday in London, Mr. Cox said the revisions seek to diminish the cost of compliance for companies, and assure investors protection.
The changes are expected to be adopted at a public meeting on Dec. 13, reports said.
Many companies have complained about the cost of the law’s compliance requirements and say that the rules are driving companies away from the U.S. across the Atlantic Ocean, where rules are weaker.
While this is welcome news for the country and the economy, it is still deeply troubling. That’s because it’s yet another instance in an endless stream of examples where a bureaucrat (never mind that he’s a smart one, or that in this case he appears to be doing the right thing) is deciding how laws are to be carried out. That is supposed to be Congress’s job. But Congress has esssentially abdicated the day-to-day operations of the federal leviathan to legions of unelected bureaucrats, both by writing vague laws that the bureaucrats then get to interpret, and by avoiding the dirty work of oversight that is among their most important constitutional duties. This is bipartisan legislative negligence of the highest order that has been allowed to go on for decades; the fact that few seem to mind doesn’t change that reality.
If you want to argue that the government is too big for the kind of legislative oversight we have a right to expect and that our congressmen and senators have a constitutional duty to provide, what you’re really telling me is either that you’re okay with the soft tyranny of a whimsical bureacracy, or that the government needs to be radically shrunk to the point where effective legislative oversight is again possible. I’m not okay with the former, and don’t understand how any reasonable person can be. I’m a big fan of the latter. Who will force a change? This guy tried; many more need to.
