Maybe. On behalf of the Free Enterprise Fund, Mr. Starr is challenging the burdensome and tyrannical Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Of course, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is an absolute monster given that it has the powers of subpoena and disciplinary action. Starr & Company are challenging the powers of this board as a violation of "the Constitution's mandated separation of powers among the three branches of government."
Sarbanes is especially impossible to commit to for smaller public companies, which usually don't have the manpower, skillsets, or knowledge base - within its intellectual capital - to conform to and maintain compliance with Sarbanes. (Thus making consulting firms very profitable.) An especially telling moment that is consistent with clueless, powermongering bureaucrats comes from this piece at Seattlepi.com:
An advisory committee appointed by the SEC formally proposed this week that the agency exempt smaller companies from the requirement - a move that would affect about 70 percent of all public companies in the United States.
SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, in appearances before Congress this week, reaffirmed his position that the goal should be to make the internal-controls requirement work so that it can apply to companies of all sizes.
"There ought to be a way to make this work," Cox said in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee.
"There ought to be a way." These bureaucrats are unabashedly authoritarian, and reality be damned.
