SOX Whistleblowers Protection

In a recent City Journal article, Nicole Gelinas, a City Journal contributing editor and the Searle Freedom Trust Fellow at the Manhattan Institute,  is overly critical of Sarbanes-Oxley.  Her article entitled Criminalizing Capitalism  warns investors not to rely upon agency regulation and/or criminal prosecutors to protect their investments.  Ms. Gelinas writes:

 ”Criminalizing bad internal controls ignores another big problem. As the Wall Street Journal’s George Anders wrote recently of the mortgage blowup, paraphrasing John Reed, Citicorp’s CEO for much of the 1980s and ’90s, “Everyone in banking points to risk management as a top priority . . . but that is often just lip service. Risk analysis can easily become a series of routine chores that offer little protection from the unexpected.” Sarbanes-Oxley, a burdensome risk-management tool, isn’t free of this weakness.”  http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_criminalizing_capitalism.html

Her argument falls apart when she attempts to portray Enron’s Lay, Skilling and Fastow as victims of overzealous prosecution. Perhaps  more telling is what Ms. Gelinas doesn’t write in her article, however.  She does not criticize the whistleblower protections of SOX because she can not. As Ms. Gelinas undoubtedly understands it is the whistleblowers help protect the investors. It was whistleblowers that brought the Securities fraud at Enron and WoldCom into the open and it is whistleblowers that deserve our respect and require the most stringent protections from us. 

SOX whistleblowers

whistleblowers help

whistleblowers protection

wrongful termination

enron whistleblowers 

enron whistle blowers

enron whistleblowing