Sarbanes-Oxley

It looks like the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance law passed by Congress a couple of years ago may be nothing more than quack corporate governance. "The gist of the literature, that the proposed mandates would not be effective, was available to legislators while they were formaulating SOX. Yet it went unnoticed or was ignored. With the scholarly literature at odds with the proposed governance mandates being treated as though it did not exist, the quality of decisionmaking that went into the SOX legislative process was, to put it mildly, less than optimal." Seems like Congress went off half cocked again.

I think this is true for most legislative bodies because it's usually only the activists who stay on top of these issues and who have time to get organized and take time off (if they aren't being paid to lobby) and go down to the legislature and testify. Unlike Congress, where you have to be invited to testify, in Colorado at least, anyone can speak out on any bill at the public hearings conducted by both the House and Senate. Whether this changes any minds is debateable. I've had the opportunity to lobby the legislature on several occasions and yes, the saying about not watching laws and sausage being made is true. HT Instapundit