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As well as the cost there's also greatly increased liability for corporate officers: http://www.kirkland.com/sitecontent.cfm?contentID=223&itemId=2510 http://w

• ajross 17y ago
  To be fair: that's completely by design. S/O was a direct reaction to the perception that the perpetrators of the Enron and Worldcom scams were essentially unprosecutable because of the difficulty of proving their knowledge of the events. So the new law puts the presumption of knowledge onto the senior executives via the certification requirement. Now, one might argue that this is bad, or has unintented consequences. But it's not a surprise. It's the intended effect. If you lie (even, perhaps, unintentionally -- though I don't think there's been a test case of that yet) on your company's financial statements in the modern USA, you are a criminal.
  • grellas 17y ago
    Indeed, it is by design but this is a field in which it is easy to get blindsided for conduct that has never been regarded as culpable on the part of management by any historical (pre-S/O) standards. Bottom line: for those who matter (i.e., those who build companies and make key decisions on whether to take them public), this is another serious disincentive to take a company public.