Ethics and rules

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Larry Ribstein is a law professor who writes on business organizations.  Here's one of his observations on Bear Stearns and the attempt to use law--particularly the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley rules--to eradicate financial risk:

Is there potential SOX internal controls liability for Bear executives? If not, and melt-downs like this can happen after SOX (worth $80+/share one day, $2 the next), then what was it, exactly, that SOX did for us? Could it be that SOX didn't eliminate risk after all?

And Tom Kirkendall sees shades of Enron here. When you're a trust-based business and the trust is gone, your value can evaporate mighty quickly. Skilling pointed out that that's exactly what happened at Enron. Tom K notes that it would have happened at AIG had that company not cut a deal with Big E. Tom says, "such loss is simply one of the risks of investing in a company based on a trust-based business model." Does this mean that Enron was all about inherent risk in the market, and not about fraud?

So two possible lessons from Bear: We didn't need SOX, and it didn't do any good.

It's a lesson we need to consider in the current push to eliminate so-called waste and fraud in charity.  At a certain point we hit not just a point of diminishing returns, but actual loss, as organizations waste their time and money on ineffective paperwork.





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