Subscribed Newsletter: The Story of SOX, Part 2: Enter the Ex-FBI Agent

Our celebration of accountants continues with the story of how the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) became the law of the land and reshaped American business forever.

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The Story of SOX, Part 2: Enter the Ex-FBI Agent

Ohio Representative Michael G. Oxley was a straight-arrow former FBI agent who was serving as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee when the Enron and WorldCom dominoes began to fall. Before he came to Congress, he knew little to nothing about corporate finance. He was much more experienced with stolen cars, kidnappings, and bank robberies.   In 2002, however, Oxley faced a problem of an entirely different magnitude. If you missed Part 1 of our story, here's the TL;DR: The Enron crisis was not just the implosion of some local Ponzi scheme, it exposed a rot that could mean the collapse of the country's entire financial system. Enron, Tyco, Worldcom showed that companies were falsifying their financial statements, and the auditors who were supposed to be guarding against this, including Arthur Andersen, the biggest and oldest auditing firm, were co-conspirators in the fraud.

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