What of SOX?

As the large banks and financial institutions (Lehman was not a bank, nor is AIG) unravel before our eyes and their managers steal off into the night with bonuses for failure, I wonder why there has been no discussion of the effectiveness of the Sarbannes-Oxley legislation.

For those of you who care to remember, Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) was signed into law in the wake of the harbinger of this round of doom and gloom: Enron. The objective of the legislation was to clean up corporate accounting and reporting practices to provide visibility and clarity into operations.

So far all SOX seems to have accomplished is to create extremely large and profitable practices at companies like KPMG and Accenture. This extremely onerous regulatory framework has accomplished nothing to prevent the type of shenanigans (an Isle of Style word if I ever wrote one) we're seeing today. All of this stuff should have been visible if SOX were effective.

Just more proof that executive compensation and corporate performance are mutually exclusive. I bet if you go look at the metrics, all of those AIG managers hit their numbers. Why weren't their goals tied to corporate performance? SOX should have told us.