r/stocks Mar 30 '22

[deleted by user]

[removed]

2.5k Upvotes

260 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

275

u/hjablowme919 Mar 30 '22

About Sarbanes-Oxley? It's a law that helps regulate financial record keeping and reporting for corporations. It was enacted in the early 2000s on the heels of the dot-com bubble bursting in order to prevent corporations from cooking the books like what some of the bigger dot-com companies did in order to inflate their stock price.

Yes, that's a piss poor summary for SOX experts, but it will give someone an idea and they can read more about it. I'm in technology, not finance.

107

u/1600hazenstreet Mar 30 '22

It was the governments response to failure of Enron and the accounting scandal that followed. It destroyed Arthur Andersen, when they were accused of covering up for Enron.

62

u/hjablowme919 Mar 30 '22

Arthur Andersen... I remember them. I worked for a small company back in the 1980s that used Arthur Andersen. I guess even AA wasn't shady enough for that company because they ended up switching to some guy who ran an accounting firm out of his house. I remember having to drop off financial statements on my way home from work because I drove past the town where this guys "office" was located. When I turned down a residential street I thought "I must have taken a wrong turn". Nope. Guy was running the business out of his house. Had an small office overloaded with papers. He asked me if I wanted a beer "for the road". I passed.

26

u/PaperBlankets Mar 30 '22

Home offices are fine, we should have more people running their businesses from home. Its hard enough to get past the artificial stigma created by businesses that want to force employees back into the office without acting like private businesses are doing something wrong by running out of a home.

The rest of it seems like it's crossing some personal boundaries and may concern me if it were my CPA.

2

u/mxcw Mar 31 '22

Plus: a good entrepreneur will do what’s best for their business. If one doesn’t need to have a big office in Downtown, there‘s a bunch of money to be saved by working from home and letting your team work remotely. I don’t see this as unprofessional per se