Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance: Identifying Gains and Costs for European Companies

Revision with unchanged content. Everyone who regularly reads the newspaper has heard about, and probably followed, the financial frauds of Enron and WorldCom and the resulting legislation reform, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOA). This reform did no only affect U.S. issuers, but also foreign private issuers But very few people know about the actual impacts of this law. Even managers of the affected companies have trouble characterizing the most important provisions of the Act. According to a study conducted in 2003 by Ernst & Young of 300 German companies affected by the SOA, only about 26 percent of the managers were able to link the Act with the terms ¿personal liability¿ and ¿SOA attestation¿. Peter Krimmer describes in the theoretical part of this book the reasons for the enactment of the Act and analyzes the most important sections of SOA in detail. The empirical part surveys how the Act impacts European Companies concentrating on their implementation level and the therewith connected costs and emerging benefits. All in all, the book provides experts and interested parties a very good overview of the compliance situation of European companies and will be useful for European public corporations thinking of a second listing at an American stock exchange as well as for already listed companies who want to compare their compliance situation with other firms.