It's taken me awhile to write this post because, well, the topic is just so sad. But I'm going to try:
Bashing Sarbanes-Oxley, the law Congress passed torein in corporate-accounting abuses, is popular locker-room banteramong executives. But it has gotten out of hand.
On Sunday, Georgia-PacificChief Executive A.D. "Pete" Correll suggested avoiding the law was areason to sell his company to privately held Koch Industries. "You getused to spending your shareholders money" on the law's provisions, hetold reporters. "But that doesn't make it right."
That terrible old Sarbanes-Oxley, "Pete" doesn't even enjoy his job anymore! Everyday, he trudges to work, sure that proving his company isn't a complex money-laundering scheme is a betrayal of those stockholders who'd lose everything if it was. The burden has grown so great that he's had to surround his name with quotation marks! This corporate McCarthysim has simply gone too far.
A recent study by Foley & Lardner LLP found thatall the costs associated with being a big public company averaged $14.3million last year. That was up 45% from the year before, due largely tothe requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley. But for a company likeGeorgia-Pacific, it's still not that big a number.
It's substantially less, for instance, than Mr.Correll himself stands to make from the 1.75 million shares ofGeorgia-Pacific stock and options issued to him by the company as ofMarch 1 and now valued at $48 a share. (That's shareholder money, too,Pete.) And it can't even begin to explain why Koch is willing to pay apremium of nearly $4 billion above market value to take Georgia-Pacificprivate.
Well, it's always darkest before the dawn, and the inky blackness brought down by Sarbanes-Oxley resists easy illumination -- thank god a philanthropic enterprise like Koch is willing to step in and save the day. They're like the Make A Wish foundation for white guys with lear jets! Three cheers for Koch!
Hopefully there'll come a day when "Pete", in all his wisdom, wealth, and anti-regulatory fervor, is able to once again trust that shareholders would prefer a few million spent to ensure against a second Enron. But if not, we'll know who to blame. The government, and all those minority democRATS hell bent on persecuting innocent plutocrats.
