Impacts of Sarbanes-Oxley Act on UK Companies - Essay Example

The law has eleven sections, each with a varying amount of subsections. Each title has tremendous effect on the business and legal environment, with titles ranging from auditing, inspection of registered public accounting firms, accounting standards, establishment of an accounting oversight board, auditor partner rotation, corporate responsibility for financial reports, and probation to personal loans to executives, among others. Sarbanes - President George W. Bush signed Oxley in July 2002. The authors of the law are Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley.

Sarbanes is the longest serving U. S. senator in Maryland history, having won his fifth term in 2000. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University, and a Harvard law degree. Sarbanes is the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. Representative Michael Oxley was elected to the Ohio House in 1972 at the age of twenty - eight. Oxley has his undergraduate degree from University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio, and received a law degree from the University of Ohio.

He is now the chairman of the House Committee of Financial Affairs. The largest part of the Sarbanes - Oxley Act is not all the sections that it covers in the law, not who signed it, or even authored it; it is how corporations will comply to this extensive piece of legislation. Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom all were under much scrutiny in the last couple of years because of personal loans given to executives for personal use. SOX bans the use of nearly all personal loans. These loans that corporations would give out to their executives were not really loans at all, but large sums of money, not expected to be paid back.