Although all public companies have been forced to become much more transparent by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, some IPOs appear to be embracing that transparency, going “above and beyond” the openness required of them by SOX.

That’s due to both cultural and legal issues; Sarbanes-Oxley has required enormous change for public companies—but for newly public companies, SOX is all they’ve ever known.


Smith “IPOs don’t have any pre-Sarbanes-Oxley internal legacy to challenge the Investor Relations departments’ desire to be transparent,” notes Bradley Smith, the director of marketing/communications for Massachusetts-based Shareholder.com, which provides shareholder communications and intelligence services for publicly traded companies.

As a result, ...