One critical area is with respect to board oversight. The Act mandated that the boards contain enough external members in order to function with relative independence from management. Board members must be sufficiently competent to detect fraud. This means that some board members should have functional competence in the areas in which the company operates while other board members should have significant financial expertise to detect suspicious transactions. Improving governance at the director level is critical to improving governance overall (Guerra, 2004)

Another area where improvement is needed is with respect to auditors and analysts. Public accounting firms had taken the attitude that auditing was an ancillary function to their consulting businesses, creating a conflict of interest. This conflict is to be eliminated, where firms are not to engage in consulting business with the companies that they audit. Analysts must have firewalls between them and the companies they analyze --...
[ View Full Essay]