Whenever a scandal, of any description occurs, the cry always goes up: “Something must be done!”.
Following Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and other corporate scandals in the US, this clamour was greater than ever. Legislation conceived in haste may rarely be good legislation, but this did not seem to worry the American administration, for whom the priority was to, in President George W Bush’s words, “restore the faith of the American people in the capital markets”. The result was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which came into force on 29 July, 2002.
