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Policy Paper Sarbanes-Oxley

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Policy Paper Sarbanes-Oxley
Final Policy Paper

Examination of Sarbanes Oxley Act

By
Murtaza Moiz
Student ID# 861034573

Ethics and Law in Business and Society
Bus 102
Professor: Dr. Sean Jasso
TA: Tommy

Table of Contents

Abstract Section 1

Prologue 1 The Past of Sarbanes Oxley Act 3 Tracing Implementation of the Bill 5 Tracing the Act’s Implementation 7 Impact on Businesses and Societies 9 Pessimistic Impacts 10 Optimistic Impacts 10 Value of Corporate Social Responsibility 11 The Exercise of Friedman vs. Carroll’s Theory 13 Policy Examination 14 Recommendations 15 Wrapping Up 16 Appendix Page 17 Reference Page 19

Abstract Section I started to think about what type of a Law or a bill I would do for my policy paper, and it dawned on me after a week of thought and brainstorming that my uncle who was a Software Engineer at Enron had gotten laid off. He never likes to talk about it, but knowing that he had lost half of what he had earned in his entire life, was gone in an instant, motivated me to choose Sarbanes Oxley Act as my policy paper. I was unable to speak to my uncle about his previous job at Enron, but keeping in mind how he has become successful again in his life motivated even more. Dr. Jasso had mentioned Sarbanes Oxley Act in class quite a few times, and used it as a key example for his lecture also. I knew the surface of what Enron had done, but did not know a lot about how Sarbanes Oxley Act was related to it. I will start off with a prologue of what the Sarbanes Oxley Act is, and later going in detail about the Act.
Prologue
The corporate scandals in the year 2001 of Enron and WorldCom, where Enron was able to produce fake reports of high profits with false accounting methods and WorldCom, who artificially reduced their expenses to falsely increase in the appearance of their revenues, created a market failure. Major stakeholders such as investors, government,

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