Now He Tells Us: Oxley Acknowledges SarBox Was Rushed, and Flawed

Thanks, Mike (HT Tom Kirkendall via Bainbridge via Instapundit; bolds are mine):

….. Oxley — the former Republican congressman from Ohio and co-author of the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance law — was asked during the question period whether he realized he had helped create one of the most crushing financial burdens ever imposed on business.Was Oxley aware, his questioners asked, that the law that he and Senator Paul Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, rushed onto the books five years ago after the collapse of Enron and WorldCom had contributed to a sharp decline in listings on U.S. stock exchanges? And, knowing what he knows now about the cost and effects of the law, would Oxley — who retired in January after 25 years in Congress — have done it any differently?

“Absolutely,” Oxley answered. “Frankly, I would have written it differently, and he would have written it differently,” he added, referring to Sarbanes. “But it was not normal times.”

But no one in the political sausage factory is clean, and that would include the Oval Office:

….. “Everybody felt like Rome was burning,” Oxley, 62, recalled during an interview after the dinner in Paris. “People felt like they were getting cheated. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in Congress in 25 years in terms of the heat from the body politic. And all the members were feeling it.”

….. At the same time, Sarbanes was pushing through an even tougher version of the bill in the Senate, adding a requirement that companies conduct internal and external audits of their financial controls. That measure, known as Section 404, rang alarm bells among U.S. companies and foreign ones that feared it would exact punitive costs for good governance.

Oxley said he felt at the time that Section 404 could spell trouble. But in the summer of 2002, with pressure also mounting from the administration of President George W. Bush, there was no question that the bill needed to be pushed through, however imperfect.

“The president called Paul and I down to the White House almost immediately after the Senate passed its bill, 97 to 0″ on July 15, Oxley recalled.

“I remember it was in the Cabinet Room and you could see the pressure he was under because the Democrats were pressing his relationship with ‘Kenny boy’” — a reference to Kenneth Lay, the chief executive of Enron, who had sought help from the administration to avoid a bankruptcy filing in the weeks before the giant energy trading company collapsed.

“The president basically said, ‘Get this wrapped up,’” Oxley said. The House and Senate quickly agreed on a new draft, and Bush signed the bill into law on July 30.

….. One reaction, he said, was that auditing entered a period of extremely conservative practice, encouraged by rulings from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a new regulatory body created by Sarbanes-Oxley. The board gave the accounting industry “almost carte blanche to do almost everything they wanted to do, which turned out to be far more expensive than anticipated,” Oxley said. “They just went crazy.”

Kirkendall says: “Yet another example of the legislative overreaction to a perceived problem being far worse than the problem itself.”

Yeah, and good luck trying to undo the damage legislatively — which is why anyone interested in a growing economy and efficient capital markets should be rooting for Ken Starr (yeah, HIM).