Thursday, June 30, 2005

Former CEO acquitted in first SOX prosecution

Silicon.com are running a story about Richard Scrushy, former CEO of healthcare firm HealthSouth who has been acquitted in first ever SOX prosecution.

For many IT Professionals, SOX (and similar legislation) has been interesting in the sense that if the rules are not obeyed, your CEO can face gaol! Not a very nice thought - and one that tends to focus senior management's attention. And since it's their butts on the line, the theory goes that they'll listen a lot more now than ever before.

However, according to the story, Scrushy was cleared on all counts. He had been accused engineering a multimillion-dollar company-wide fraud scheme but denied knowing anything about it. Given this high profile failure, it begs the question as to how much teeth SOX actually has.

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