PLease assist doctoral work 2429



  • 8O
    Please assist. We are having a lively discussion on regulatory issues in health care. one point that was brought up was the discontinuance of free lunches from medical sales and pharmaceutical reps. One person stated that most companies do not allow this anymore as they wish to stay in compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Others state that this continues to occur.
    What section of this Act addresses such actions as free lunches. I am overwhelmed with the Act itself and feel that I don’t know where to begin
    I am very appreciative to any assistance anyone can give.
    Thank You - Amy



  • I cannot think of any section of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that deals with criminal provisions concering the bribery of corporate employees, of domestic officals or of forgein officials (that’s the domain of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 usdoj.gov/criminal/fcpa that can also cover employees of foreign state owned or public insurance owned hospitals).
    If you want to search the Sarbanes-Oxley Act itself to be on the safe side, you can safely skip the first title dealing with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, you can also skip the titles with sections starting with 20X, 30X and 40X as those deal with corporations. There are some titles further to the back that amend title 18 (federal criminal provisions), but they relate to white collar crimes, mostly fraud. Check those, but I do not think you will find anything there.
    It’s been somewhat of a fashion to cite the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as a reason for a lot of things, so most likley what you heard was just bullsh…



  • Another classic for the list of ‘things done in the name of SOX’ :lol:



  • Hi and welcome to the forums … and I also agree with the other 2 experts 🙂
    The problem is that SOX is interpretive in nature. It requires a company to establish controls in a self-monitoring fashion (with verifications by SOX external auditors and signoffs by senior management). Thus as Denis shares, a company can implement any procedure they want to and mandate it ‘in the name of SOX’ (whether it’s truly applicable or not).
    We’ve seen a similar thing in the past where a company rep couldn’t even give out 50 cent ink pens with their logo on it. The key things that need to be under the SOX umbrellas are financial risks that are ‘material’ in nature.
    A vendor sponsored lunch isn’t at the same level of controling a USD100,000 bookkeeping entry from fraud risks. The misapplication of SOX adds greatly to it’s expense and burdens the company with bureaucracy as well.
    If companies want to go beyond the minimum requirements of SOX, they can do so. It should not be ascribed to SOX itself. But in many cases, it’s probably done to empower those wanting to make a control change beyond the high-level standards found in the act itself.


Log in to reply