One other new thing brought to the attention of companies by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is the fact that, under this law, every public company is supposed to prove strong internal systems designed to catch an employee intending to commit fraud or flag accounting errors before a company has the opportunity to make its profits official. An addendum to this rule is the obligation of a company knowing about problems with its control systems to disclose what it has uncovered. This obligation generated what an author called the "current flood of mea culpas."

As mentioned above, many companies have faced serious difficulties during the last few years. Companies conducting their activity in Silicon Valley, for instance, such as Versant, Portal Software and Sipex, have acknowledged that they have encountered problems such as not having experienced accounting staff, lacking checks and balances in the case of employees handling corporate cash and the...
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