As someone who had to deal a lot with SOX compliance throughout my career, I would love to see the regulations loosened. They are overly onerous and in many cases downright bad, because they are so broadly written. At the same time, enforcement is terrible, because of the same broadly written rules.
Basically, you and your auditor work together to come up with an overly complex set of rules that somewhat meets the requirements, then your auditor brings in a bunch of consultants to help you implement their rules, which usually just means checking a lot of boxes, and then everyone calls it a day.
So really all it does is create a lot of work for a lot of people for very little gain. In a lot of cases we were going to do some of that stuff anyway, but now we had to slow down and show the auditor all the work. An auditor who usually doesn't care -- all they want to do is be able to say "yep I watched their presentation on this".
So I was quite surprised by the headline, that the auditor firms would want to roll it back. It's basically just a huge money maker for them.
And then I saw what they want to change -- they want to make the rules looser on how the auditors are audited. Basically they want to be able to keep being lazy.
SOX had great intentions but was one of the most poorly implemented regulations ever.
Basically, you and your auditor work together to come up with an overly complex set of rules that somewhat meets the requirements, then your auditor brings in a bunch of consultants to help you implement their rules, which usually just means checking a lot of boxes, and then everyone calls it a day.
So really all it does is create a lot of work for a lot of people for very little gain. In a lot of cases we were going to do some of that stuff anyway, but now we had to slow down and show the auditor all the work. An auditor who usually doesn't care -- all they want to do is be able to say "yep I watched their presentation on this".
So I was quite surprised by the headline, that the auditor firms would want to roll it back. It's basically just a huge money maker for them.
And then I saw what they want to change -- they want to make the rules looser on how the auditors are audited. Basically they want to be able to keep being lazy.
SOX had great intentions but was one of the most poorly implemented regulations ever.