Businesses Challenge Sarb-Ox
http://www.cato.org/view_ddispatch.php?viewdate=20070312#1
"A major anti-regulatory offensive culminates this week with a one-two punch thrown by Washington and Wall Street's most moneyed institutions, as the Treasury Department convenes a star-studded meeting [on Tuesday] and the nation's largest business lobby issues its own call to action a day later," reports The Washington Post. "Five years after debacles at Enron and WorldCom ushered in the Sarbanes-Oxley law and forced companies to spend more to detect fraud, the campaign to shake off government watchdogs again is in full swing."
In "Enron's Last Victim: American Markets," Cato chairman William Niskanen argues that corporate regulations have hurt businesses more than they have helped investor confidence: "Sarbanes-Oxley has seriously harmed American corporations and financial markets without increasing investor confidence. The section of the law requiring companies to perform internal audits has turned out to be far more costly than proponents projected, especially for smaller firms. These costs have led some small companies to go private, hardly a victory for public oversight, and some foreign firms to withdraw their stocks from American exchanges."