For all of you accounting and financial reporting types waiting for the other shoe to drop: consider it done.
Since last summer, when the Securities and Exchange Commission promised a kinder, gentler (read: cheaper, easier) version of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, we have all eagerly waited for said guidance to appear. All this spring, the SEC and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board teased us with hints of what the guidance might look like: more discretion given to auditors who inspect a company’s internal controls; more credit given to companies that do their own inspection of internal controls in accordance with the SEC guidance. But nobody really knew what the regulators would deliver—and hence, nobody really knew how compliance efforts might be improved—until the guidance actually arrived.
