The Powerful Nation State: Sarbanes—Oxley and the Global Reach of Regulation

Abstract

This chapter looks at unilateral national legal reforms as well as if and how these reforms have spilt over into other countries. Our object is the Sarbanes—Oxley Act of 2002 (SOA), which may be seen as the biggest upheaval of accounting regulation in the US since the New Deal regulations, which established the SEC. The SOA is a reaction to the wave of accounting scandals in the US, which happened in the early 2000s. Share prices collapsed after aggressive or illegal accounting practices had come to light that either had slipped the auditors’ attention or had even been accepted by them.