|  | | 2005 News and Press Releases | | |
HEADLINE NEWS:
Profiting From Cures For The Sarbanes-Oxley Blues
Eve Tahmincioglu
The New York Times Company. December 29, 2005
_________________________________________________________________________
EXCERPT: Who would have thought the scandals at major corporations like Enron and WorldCom would be a boon for owners of some businesses? But that is just what has happened. New regulations that sprang from systematic fraud at those two corporations have created a cottage industry of businesses that provide consulting, accounting, computer security and other services to help companies cope with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. That law was passed in an effort to clean up corporate accounting. Sarbanes-Oxley, nicknamed SOX in the financial world, requires corporate managers to evaluate internal financial controls, hire outside accountants to review those controls annually, make more information available to the public and to follow procedures to stifle fraud. Critics say the new rules are burdensome, expensive and of questionable value, but some entrepreneurs smelled the sweet scent of opportunity in somebody else's problem. Sanjay Anand, who ran his own financial and technology consulting business, created the Sarbanes-Oxley Institute of Clifton, N.J., this year to offer training and his brand of Sarbanes-Oxley certification. Diane Wolff transformed her financial-management business, the Blue Sage Group of Canton, Mass., into a firm that helps publicly traded companies comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, most recently introducing a compliance software package for small and medium-size businesses. Shai Stern created Vintage Filings, also in New York, to help public firms format and file financial statements quickly and economically. Some of these entrepreneurs say their company's revenue has doubled and tripled since they began to provide advice and services to companies needing to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. This year alone, public companies will have spent an estimated $3.5 billion on technology and consulting services to meet their Sarbanes-Oxley obligations, according to John Hagerty, a vice president at the Boston-based AMR Research, which released an annual compliance survey of information-technology and business leaders in November. And there are no signs of a letup. The survey found that more than 80 percent of the companies polled planned to update their compliance initiatives in the next 12 months. ''It's like a new-found religion has formed around SOX compliance,'' Mr. Hagerty said. |
|
|
