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SOX-online: The Vendor-Neutral Sarbanes-Oxley Site
The SEC and PCAOB Center
SOX-online has created a new SEC and PCAOB Center to assist you in finding Sarbanes-Oxley related information about these groups. Look in the
SEC section for links to important SEC materials, and check out the PCAOB section for important PCAOB links as well as targeted information about PCAOB standards.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
According to the SEC, "the primary mission of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is to protect investors and maintain the integrity of the securities markets."
The SEC site says "The laws and rules that govern the securities industry in the United States derive from a simple and straightforward concept: all investors, whether large institutions or private individuals, should have access to certain basic facts about an investment prior to buying it. To achieve this, the SEC requires public companies to disclose meaningful financial and other information to the public, which provides a common pool of knowledge for all investors to use to judge for themselves if a company's securities are a good investment."
Find out more about the SEC at
their official website.
The SOX-online SEC section contains links to official SEC pages: News Releases, FAQs, Final and Proposed Rulemaking, and others.
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)
The PCAOB is a private-sector, non-profit corporation, created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, to oversee the auditors of public companies in order to protect the interests of investors and further the public interest in the preparation of informative, fair, and independent audit reports.
Strictly speaking, the PCAOB does not regulate public companies - that still falls to the SEC. The PCAOB oversees auditors, so PCAOB guidance is aimed toward how auditors should conduct their audits, rather than how Business and IT groups should conduct their activities. Of course, every company wants to know how it will be audited....
The SOX-online PCAOB section has links to PCAOB rulings, standards, bios, press releases, bylaws, webcasts, and more. It includes a link to the official list of registered accounting firms allowed to prepare or issue audit reports on U.S. public companies and to participate in such audits.
