Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Easing of SEC rules helps game companies

I wasn't expecting this to happen this fast. SEC Chairman Christopher Cox had said Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) was too onerous, but I didn't think things would happen this fast.

The SEC just proposed a rules relaxation -- primarily of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley law.

This basically gives corporate managers of small companies flexibility in assessing the strength of their internal financial controls. Before, this was a time suck, sucked cycles from development and management resources that could be doing other stuff, and just generally sucked.

In addition, there were a bunch of publically traded game companies on notice for Section 404 -- so it's good to see the insanity relaxed. The SEC changes basically let small companies "to scale and tailor" their procedures for assessing their internal controls.

Bob Greifeld (prez and CEO of the Nasdaq Stock Market) said the revisions "will allow companies to focus on the most important aspects of internal controls and financial reporting, while removing unnecessary expense."

Of course, this doesn't help me at BigHugeCorp, but it will hopefully help small, publically traded game companies in that other vertical market I know and love.

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