I read this press release this morning and feel that our readers will find it interesting. It details the Center for Audit Quality's reaction to the Supreme Court's PCAOB Decision:

For those of you who are curious,  the below article from TNBankers.org gives descriptions of some of the key provisions of the Reform Bill that is currently being worked on:

The Ohio Society of CPAs  commented on the "Last-minute attempt made to remove small public company exemption from financial reform"  in 404(b) in the article below on 25 June 2010. They discussed the fact that investors in small companies deserve safeguards against possible fraud. After all, if there are no safeguards to prevent fraud for small public companies, that will ultimately lead to a lack of investment in these companies as investors will not feel secure in doing so. Click  here to read the full statement.

While reading The Harvard Law School Forum I came across a post that discusses the "Sarbanes-Oxley 'Clawback' Developments" by John F. Savarese. It is very interesting, and if you would like to read it, click  here.

PRNewswire has a very interesting article on the most recent FEI Survey titled "FEI Survey: Companies Report Signs of Stabilization with 2009 Auditing Process." The survey found that most companies complying with SOX had smoother audit processes and felt they had better control and understanding of their company as well as their responsibility. Ultimately, they found SOX to be valuable to their business process. If you would like to read the full article about the survey and its findings, please click on the link below:

I read a press release titled "Decision in Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB". To read the full press release, click on the link below: 

Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404(b), defined as the requirement to have internal controls reviewed and opined by an external auditor, became a requirement for non-accelerated filers or those companies with a market cap of less than $75MM (after removing insiders, etc) on June 15, 2010.  

Vibato is delighted to announce that we are now offering our SOX Compliance Made Simple® product suite in Mandarin. This includes our SOX Basic®, Risk Assessment, Segregation of Duties, and all of our pre-defined process cycles and software.   

VIBATO Successfully Delivers Small-Scale Sarbanes-Oxley Implementation For ORIGINOIL, INC.

The amendment below to the Wall Street Reform Act has been passed.  The amendment still needs to be signed into law but it requires (among other things) an Independent Compensation Committee.  This will impact certain exchanges and will most certainly be tested as part of Sarbanes-Oxley controls.

PriceWaterHouseCoopers posted a great update today. Please read the quoted summary below and follow the link to read the full update!

Vibato is now on Facebook!

Tech Journal South posted a great article today about the Supreme Court's soon expected decision on SOX.

Again, from Fawn.  This is more information about how the permanent Sarbanes-Oxley 404(b) reprieve for non-accelerated filers was first voted down and then approved - both in the same meeting.  More to come. 

This is a study from the SEC.  It contains very interesting information on 404 and the benefits investors found in companies which complied with 404. 

I contacted Fawn who posted the following press release today:

A 2007 study from the SEC of the benefits of Sarbanes-Oxley is listed below.   There are some excellent statistics about costing trends.  Now, our solutions are extraordinarily less expensive than the costs listed below but the information presented below is very meaningful.  

Jake Leon from thecaq.com commented:

From the House Committee on Financial Services.  See the red text for Sarbanes-Oxley related topics, times/dates.

As expected, there has been a lot of talk about the Wall Street Reform Act and what company's may do/not do if the permanent reprieve is granted.  This is a very interesting topic for us since we understand the need to lessen the financial burden of an audit but we often find it ironic that, even though our clients have been subjected to SOX 404(a) since 2007, they still are debating on changing up their 404 activities if the reprieve is granted.  To that end, I have to ask the question, what do you expect to change for your company if the reprieve were to happen (given that most of the companies debating this issue have never been subjected to a 404(b) audit – I’m missing the trigger that would cause the need for this debate…could it be that most of them were only doing Sarbanes-Oxley work because of the fear of review by their external auditor and now that they may never be subjected to a full-blown 404(b) audit they may decide to do nothing?!?!?… (which would be fraud by the way per the 302/906 certifications and 10Q Item 4’s and 10K item 9’s but that is beside the point))?