Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley Acts: Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley Acts are important legislations in the corporate world because of their link to public and privately held companies. Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted to enhance transparency and accountability in publicly traded companies. On the contrary, Dodd-Frank Act was enacted to disentangle the confused web of financial service company valuations. Actually, these valuations are usually hidden by complex and unclear financial instruments. The introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley Act was fueled by recent incidents of accounting frauds by top executives of major corporations such as Enron. In contrast, Dodd-Frank Act was enacted as a response to the tendency by banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, rating agencies, and accounting companies to serve up harmful offer of ruined assets and liabilities brought by systemic non-disclosure (Anand, 2011, p.1). While these regulations have some similarities and differences, they have a strong relationship with the financial markets. Relationship between the Acts and Financial Markets: Since they are financial legislation, Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Dodd-Frank Act have strong relationship with the modern financial markets. This relationship is mainly attributed to the implications that the acts have on market participants, regulators, investors, and markets in general. These acts primarily focus on promoting the health and vitality of financial markets by addressing several practices that could have considerable negative effects on market participants and the economy in general. Actually, Dodd-Frank, which is arguably the most important financial legislation in modern economy, brought significant changes that contributed to changes in th... ... middle of paper ... ...ank Act applies to existing current or former executives (Goodman, Olson & Fontenot, 2010, p.72). Consequently, Dodd-Frank executes a three-year lookback period while the Sarbanes-Oxley Act implements a one-year lookback period. Conclusion: Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Dodd-Frank Act are some of the most important regulations in the modern financial environment. The significance of these regulations is attributed to their focus on promoting the vitality of financial markets through addressing complexities in financial procedures and preventing financial wrongdoing. The enactment of these regulations was fueled by some financial irregularities in the corporate world and some major players in the financial markets. Despite the strong link between these laws and the financial markets, they have some similarities and differences in light of their respective objectives.
In 2002, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) to strengthen corporate governance and restore investor confidence. The act’s most important provision, §404, requires management and independent auditors to evaluate annually a firm’s internal financial-reporting controls. In addition, SOX tightens disclosure rules, requires management to certify the firm’s periodic reports, strengthens boards’ independence and financial-literacy requirements, and raises auditor-independence standards.
CEO Jeffery Skilling and Kenneth Lay, the CEO prior to Skilling, were taken to trial. They were both found guilty of committing multiple types of financial crimes, and sentenced to 24 years in prison. CFO Andrew Fastow was also taken to trial and was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. The collapse of such a large corporation led to changes in financial controls. U.S. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. The SOX Act protects investors from deceitful accounting actions by companies (4). The Financial Accounting Standards Board increased its ethical behavior. FASB is responsible for generally accepted accounting principles, which provides standards for financial statements of publicly traded companies. These changes brought to life after the Enron scandal have decreased fraud and increased investor confidence. Although the acts that Enron committed were immoral and destroyed thousands of lives, it has lead an increase of controls and compliance, preventing something like this from happening in the
In late 2008, the world economy seemingly grinded to a halt. Wall Street, unable to reconcile the liquidity crisis and financial losses that stemmed from its bad bets on mortgage backed securities, turned to the United States government for help. What resulted was the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (“TARP”), the largest government bailout in the history of the United States. After the dust settled and Wall Street, with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, managed to avert a global financial meltdown, Congress put pen to paper to ensure that the same crisis would never happen again. On July 21, 2010, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (the “Dodd-Frank Act”), a nearly 900-page behemoth of financial reform, was signed into law. The Dodd-Frank Act was meant to reform that the unsavory and opaque practices that led to the 2008 crisis – it does so by introducing a stricter financial regulatory regime in which Wall Street must operate.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act’s policies haven’t really been implemented to the extent that regulators would have liked. Although the legislation takes many steps in addressing systematic risks in the United States financial system and improving coordination among regulators, some critics believe that alternative options might have been more effective. The coming years will give us a better understanding of how well the Dodd-Frank Act addressed these concerns.
Throughout the past several years major corporate scandals have rocked the economy and hurt investor confidence. The largest bankruptcies in history have resulted from greedy executives that “cook the books” to gain the numbers they want. These scandals typically involve complex methods for misusing or misdirecting funds, overstating revenues, understating expenses, overstating the value of assets or underreporting of liabilities, sometimes with the cooperation of officials in other corporations (Medura 1-3). In response to the increasing number of scandals the US government amended the Sarbanes Oxley act of 2002 to mitigate these problems. Sarbanes Oxley has extensive regulations that hold the CEO and top executives responsible for the numbers they report but problems still occur. To ensure proper accounting standards have been used Sarbanes Oxley also requires that public companies be audited by accounting firms (Livingstone). The problem is that the accounting firms are also public companies that also have to look after their bottom line while still remaining objective with the corporations they audit. When an accounting firm is hired the company that hired them has the power in the relationship. When the company has the power they can bully the firm into doing what they tell them to do. The accounting firm then loses its objectivity and independence making their job ineffective and not accomplishing their goal of honest accounting (Gerard). Their have been 379 convictions of fraud to date, and 3 to 6 new cases opening per month. The problem has clearly not been solved (Ulinski).
In conclusion, to help control the economy of the United States many initiatives were taken. The Great Depression brought upon several reform and recovery acts, which involved the Glass-Steagall Act and within the past decade due to another financial crisis and to overcome this crisis the Dodd-Frank Act and the Volcker Rule were passed. These passed acts and rules succeeded in specific ways, such as the Dodd-Frank Act accomplished goals of reducing the “too big to fail” belief of major financial
Major banks are cutting back on some of their legally permitted operations, such as- market making, and that has led to liquidity issues in the bond markets. Proprietary trading could become unregulated if more banking activities continue moving towards the shadow banking system. This would essentially defeat one of the main purposes of Volcker Rule. [d] The third major unintended consequence has been the degree by which the Federal Reserve has become the main regulator of the finance industry. In order to discourage future bailouts similar to the ones during the financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank Act limited the Fed’s emergency powers. However the liquidity and capital standards now imposed by Fed has purportedly become one of the most important regulatory developments of the Dodd-Frank Act.
The Sarbanes Oxley Act was enacted to restore the investor’s confidence in businesses and to detect and prevent fraud
Cited as one of the most influential and paramount financial regulation since 1930’s, Dodd-Frank act and Consumer Protection Act was passed by the Obama Administration in 2010 as a response to the financial crisis of 2008. It is not a hidden fact that after the repealing of Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, commercial banks again started investing in unregulated derivatives, and this unregulated and least supervised investment channels of banks led to formation of cowboy financing, eventually leading to massive carnage in the US economy in the form of financial crisis of 2007-08. Learning from the mistake of past government, and to endow a supervisory eye on investments and risk channels of the bank, the Obama Administration passed the law in order to have a sweeping impact on the delivery of financial services in the United States. Therefore, Dodd-Frank Act is a legislative proposal to reform the entire financial service industry in the United States, in order to prevent financial crisis.
The "subprime crises" was one of the most significant financial events since the Great Depression and definitely left a mark upon the country as we remain upon a steady path towards recovering fully. The financial crisis of 2008, became a defining moment within the infrastructure of the US financial system and its need for restructuring. One of the main moments that alerted the global economy of our declining state was the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on Sunday, September 14, 2008 and after this the economy began spreading as companies and individuals were struggling to find a way around this crisis. (Murphy, 2008) The US banking sector was first hit with a crisis amongst liquidity and declining world stock markets as well. The subprime mortgage crisis was characterized by a decrease within the housing market due to excessive individuals and corporate debt along with risky lending and borrowing practices. Over time, the market apparently began displaying more weaknesses as the global financial system was being affected. With this being said, this brings into question about who is actually to assume blame for this financial fiasco. It is extremely hard to just assign blame to one individual party as there were many different factors at work here. This paper will analyze how the stakeholders created a financial disaster and did nothing to prevent it as the credit rating agencies created an amount of turmoil due to their unethical decisions and costly mistakes.
Most of Scrushy’s alleged misconduct occurred prior to the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). To sum...
...he Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. After, analyzing the three theories, virtue ethics and act utilitarianism, and Kant’s duty ethics, the two philosophical views favored Alex to be honest and abide by the law. In the theory of virtue ethics, it is because the virtuous action to be taken in this scenario is to be honest, and for the theory of Kant’s duty ethics, the only action to pass the CI formulation this scenario is for Alex to abide by the law. Even, for the theory of act utilitarianism, the recommendation can be subjective therefore it may favor Alex to be honest and abide by the law because of the overall effect honesty has on society which can be considered the greatest good for the greatest number.
During the 1920s, approximately 20 million Americans took advantage of post-war prosperity by purchasing shares of stock in various securities exchanges. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the fortunes of many investors were lost. In addition, banks lost great sums of money in the Crash because they had invested heavily in the markets. When people feared their banks might not be able to pay back the money that depositors had in their accounts, a “run” on the banking system caused many bank failures. After the crash, public confidence in the market and the economy fell sharply. In response, Congress held hearings to identify the problems and look for solutions; the answer was found in the new SEC. The Commission was established in 1934 to enforce new securities laws that were passed with the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The two new laws stated that “Companies publicly offering securities must tell the public the truth about their businesses, the securities they are selling and the risks involved in the investing.” Secondly, “People who sell and trade securities must treat investors fairly and honestly, putting investors’ interests first.”2
By looking at the Enron scandal, there are three major financial-related reformations that have been addressed by the SOX. First, “SOX forbids auditors of public firms from providing to their audit clients most non-audit consulting services” (Prentice, p.9, 2010). This reformation prevents Anderson’s wrongdoing from happening. Second, SOX restricts “off-balance sheet reporting, use of special purpose entities, and pro forma reporting” (Prentice, p.10, 2010). The new rule fixed the fundamental problem raised in the Enron’s scandal, which is the use of “Mark-to-market” accounting policy. Third, “SOX reforms stock analyst practices, primarily by minimizing, in several ways, the motivations they had to falsely praise the stocks of companies whose investment banking business their employers sought” (Prentice, p.10, 2010). This reform prevents stock analysts from giving good ratings
The company concealed huge debts off its balance sheet, which resulted in overstating earnings. Due to an understatement of debts, the company was considered bankrupt in 2001. Shareholders lost $74 billion and a lot of jobs were lost because of the bankruptcy. The share prices of Enron started falling in 2000 and in 2001 the company revealed a huge loss. Even after all this, the company’s executives told the investors that the stock was just undervalued and they wanted their investors to keep on investing. The investors lost trust in the company as stock prices decreased, which led the company to file bankruptcy in December 2001. This shows how a lack of transparency in reporting of financial statements leads to the destruction of a company. This all happened under the watchful eye of an auditor, Arthur Andersen. After this scandal, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was changed to keep into account the role of the auditors and how they can help in preventing such