Whether the fault lies with poor attitude or poor execution, four years after Sarbanes-Oxley was passed to galvanize the spirit of corporate governance, some companies are still painfully out of tune on that point.
In a Compliance Week analysis of 2005 material weakness disclosures, 20 of the 400 companies surveyed confessed to internal control problems numerous and pervasive enough to indicate a larger problem: the dreaded “tone at the top.”
Only a tiny fraction of those 20 companies were so explicit in describing the problem behind the problems. Stone Energy Corp., a $630 million energy concern, reported bluntly: “We lacked adequate ...