SOX after Ten Years: A Multidisciplinary Review

SOX is an immense drag on any US business, and on any business doing business with a US business.

I've seen this firsthand at two companies (Systor and Accenture). Adherence to SOX creates insane bureaucracies and makes an organization utterly inflexible. It introduces a pleathora of glass ceilings and most employees spend their time ticking off checkboxes on compliance forms, rather than performing actual work. On top of that, it also erodes moral/ethical behavior, because at all levels of management, it creates the impression that as long as you're in compliance, everything else goes.

SOX is the reason why companies like Valve will likely never go public. It's also the reason why so many small companies who go public, fall on hard times. A previously successful, flexible culture suddenly finds itself siloed into the SOX (aka sucks) work structure where all flexibility and cross-departmental/hierarchical communication ceases. Where SOX creates the perfect breeding ground for disassociated upper management to replace the founders and passionate people on top.