Sarbanes-Oxley Law

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Sarbanes-Oxley Law Stephanie Mosley ACC 340 University of Phoenix Richard Calabria 07/23/2012 To enhance the dependability and accountability in an effort to safeguard shareholders, the federal government for the United States of America established the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on July 30, 2002. The Public Company Accounting Reform and Protection Act of 2002 is also used to refer to this law. Numerous acts of corruption in the business sector continued throughout the late 1990s as well as early part of 2000 with no laws to prevent it. In response to the very public case of WorldCom and Enron fiscal scams, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (commonly called SOX) was passed to protect the public and investors from unfair practices and accounting mistakes (Rouse, 2007). In order to safeguard shareholders, the president at that time President George Bush pushed for the act to get passed by the Senate and House of Representatives. The law was immediately signed by the president after the law passed the Senate 99-0 and the House of Representative 423-3 (Bumgardner, 2003). Since the law passed, it has been viewed as the best measure since the…show more content…
The offenses are harmful to not only businesses in the United States of America but to the world of business as a whole and are unacceptable. If the law had been in place, many shareholders would have been safeguarded but numerous investors lost their lifetime savings by company insiders. The corporate world is a much more secure place with regards to investing with all of the changes and modifications which are now enforced. I still think there are other actions which can be taken to protect shareholders even though the modifications have significantly improved the procedure. Businesses must develop an ethical balance so as not to take advantage of unknowing shareholders who have invested their lifetime
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