Business/financial NOOB needs help...Sarbanes-Oxley?

HELP!!

I am a mechanical engineer and I am trying to bring to market a new product with my design team. I am having difficulty understanding the Sarbanes-Oxley act, being a mechanical engineer and most legal/finance lingo overwhelms my little head. I tried the Sarbanes-Oxley wiki... and holy moly... "HUH... what did I just read?"

Basically, I need to make certain the physical parts I design, the vendors I qualify to fabricate my piece part sub-components, and my bill of material cost structure does not violate SOX.

Can someone explain Sarbanes-Oxley in a couple paragraphs to say a 10 year old (me)..??? think "Sarbanes-Oxley for Dummies"

BIG thanks!!

How about several sentences:

1) Don't lie

2) Don't make up poop (see #1)

3) Don't try to hide/obscure information (see #2)


First of all, are you a publicly traded company? If you are large enough to be one, do you not have a go-to lawyer (or legal dept.) to handle that beast? If you are part of a larger company, hand it off to their legal dept to take care of it.

bingo. essentially a check and balance system for all companies traded on the NYSE. Companies, like the one I work for which is french owned and traded, are exempt de re. De facto, however, it's quite good practice. We still employ PWC for annual as well as spot financial auditing.

good luck. it's quite a bear. however, division of labor is critical in the business flow and complete transparency is a must.

Brett

bitslammer said:

If you're not publicly traded then SOX doesn't apply to you.

SOX requires you to use an independent 3rd party auditor to "certify" or sign off that you are abiding by the standards spelled out in SOX. It's not a "self certifying" process so that 3rd party auditor would tell you where you fall short.
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As an I/T guy my experience on that front (as a corollary to #3) is that you're required to keep nearly all data, meaning emails & any other forms of communications. It makes for quite a data storage issue sometimes.

But my perspective is so limited that I didn't even know that it only applied to publicly traded companies. That's good to know.