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Making Sense of SOX
Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.
Mention Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), and most PMs' eyes cross. And for good reason. If it makes you feel better: If Sarbanes-Oxley hadn't come along, there would have been an equally odious law--bloated with rules, sections, abbreviations and acronyms--in its place.
Starting with Enron (the seventh largest corporation in the United States), now--or at some other point in time--the country suffered a wave of corporate scandals that ended in the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in stock market value. When one of the most powerful global companies' top executives is scamming its shareholders, not to mention its worldwide workforce, something is very wrong in Camelot. And when equally powerful WorldCom, Arthur Andersen and Kmart are discovered doing equally nasty things--with their executives living better than royalty--something has to be done pronto.
"Under the reign of Enron's Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, more than 6,000 Enron employees lost their retirement savings because their 401(k) plans were frozen and they were not allowed to sell their Enron stock as it plummeted to near worthlessness," explains Jill Gilbert Welytok, founder of the Absolute Technology Law Group in Milwaukee, and a specialist in corporate and non-profit law. Welytok is also the author of Sarbanes-Oxley for Dummies (Wiley).
"The day before Enron declared bankruptcy, bonus checks for more than $…
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