Karen Seymour had high hopes for Sarbanes-Oxley. Ten years ago, when the law was passed, Seymour was chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, which is regarded as the country’s most prolific prosecutor of financial crimes. When she read Sarbanes-Oxley’s certification provisions, which specify that CEOs and CFOs can be sent to prison for falsely certifying corporate financial reports and reports on internal controls, she thought she finally had a way of getting at wrongdoing by top officials. “I thought it was going to be a really good tool,” she said in an interview this week. “But it never really developed.”
As Sarbanes-Oxley marks its 10th anniversary on Monday, its promise of holding CEOs and CFOs criminally responsible remains unfulfilled. The law states that if top corporate executives knowingly sign off on a false financial report, they’re subject to a prison term of up to 10 years and a fine of up to $1 million, with penalties escalating to 20 years and $5 million if their misconduct is willful. After accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom and a host of other public companies, SOX’s certification provisions, according to Seymour and other former prosecutors, seemed like a clean, simple way to tie CEOs and CFOs to corporate crimes.
But in practice, exceedingly few defendants have even been charged with false certification, and fewer still have been convicted. The most notorious SOX criminal case, against former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, ended in an acquittal in 2005. In 2007, the former CFO of a medical equipment financing company called DVI pleaded guilty to mail fraud and false certification and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. In a more recent case, a SOX false certification charge against former Vitesse CEO Louis Tomasetta was dismissed. (Tomasetta’s trial on other charges ended in a mistrial in April.) The Justice Department doesn’t directly track Sarbanes-Oxley prosecutions, so there may be another case here or there. Even four or five SOX criminal cases in 10 years, though, makes them as rare as a blue moon.
There’s been renewed interest in Sarbanes-Oxley as a potential tool in investigations of Wal-Mart’s alleged Mexican bribery and JPMorgan’s risky credit default swap trading. On 60 Minutes last December, correspondent Steve Kroft raised the prospect of using SOX to prosecute bank executives for their role in the mortgage crisis.
That makes the question of why, after a decade, Sarbanes-Oxley hasn’t been a boon to the prosecution of corporate crime all the more pressing. Why aren’t SOX’s false certification provisions producing the sort of quick, easy cases that prosecutors like Seymour envisioned when the law was first passed?
