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))?
