Sarbanes-Oxley Act History
The history of the act is fairly interesting. The House passed Rep. Oxley’s bill (H.R. 3763) on April 25, 2002, by a vote of 334 to 90. The House then referred the “Corporate and Auditing Accountability, Responsibility, and Transparency Act” or “CAARTA” to the Senate Banking Committee with the support of President Bush and the SEC. At the time, however, the Chairman of that Committee, Senator Paul Sarbanes (D-MD), was preparing his own proposal, Senate Bill 2673.Senator Sarbanes’s bill passed the Senate Banking Committee on June 18, 2002, by a vote of seventeen to four. On June 25, 2002, WorldCom revealed that it had overstated its earnings by more than $3.8 billion during the past five quarters, primarily by improperly accounting for its operating costs. Senator Sarbanes introduced Senate Bill 2673 to the full Senate that very same day and it passed 97 to 0 less than three weeks later on July 15, 2002.
The House and the Senate formed a Conference Committee to reconcile the differences between Senator Sarbanes’s bill (S. 2673) and Representative Oxley’s bill (H.R. 3763). The conference committee relied heavily on Senate Bill 2673 and most changes made by the conference committee strengthened the prescriptions of S. 2673 or added new prescriptions.? (John T. Bostelman, The Sarbanes-Oxley Deskbook § 2-31.)
The Committee approved the final conference bill on July 24, 2002 and gave it the name “the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.” The next day, both houses of Congress voted on it without change, producing an overwhelming margin of victory: 423 to 3 in the House and 99 to 0 in the Senate. On July 30, 2002, President George W. Bush signed it into law, stating that it included “the most far-reaching reforms of American business practices since the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” (”Elisabeth Bumiller, Bush Signs Bill Aimed at Fraud in Corporations”, The New York Times, July 31, 2002, page A1.)
[via Wikipedia]
