Revenge Of The Bean Counters

Of course, with the bean counters cashing in, the expense side of the ledger is going up for clients. The largest U.S. companies will typically spend more than $4.6 million each to comply with just one section of the law, according to Financial Executives International. And large companies complain that the get-tough accounting regimen is draining resources. Paul Schmidt, controller for General Motors, says GM's audit committee meets "six to seven times face to face and four to five times by teleconference" annually. The "bigger drain," says Schmidt, is that GM's chairman and CFO are spending more time on accounting and certification issues, "instead of on strategy."

Watchdog groups, on the other hand, say some of the changes imposed by Sox are toothless. When Congress was drafting the law, "the accounting firms worked hard to minimize its scope," says Barbara Roper of the Consumer Federation of America. Unlike the mutual-fund and securities industries, she says, "the accounting profession never really acknowledged that there was a serious problem with the way it did business."

But having paid out huge settlements to the angry shareholders of their crooked clients, the accountants know whom they really work for. And now they really do have something in common with wobbly shopping carts: they're both hard to push around.