Power of Attorney
The Oxford dictionary defines a Power of Attorney as “the authority to act for another person in specified legal or financial matters”. In other words, granting someone a power of attorney empowers that person to manage your financial or legal affairs within defined boundaries. The person authorizing the other to act is the “Principal” and the one authorized to act is the “Agent” or “Attorney In Fact” (AIF).
The Power of Attorney may be verbal—such as requesting someone to sign your name on a document—or it may be done in writing. However, institutions such as banks require SOX attorney to be in writing before they will honor it, and they usually request the original copy. When appointing an AIF, the principal should authorize someone he trusts implicitly. The Power of Attorney must be drafted keeping state law requirements in mind; most people use an attorney for this chore, while others prefer doing it themselves with the aid of a fill-in-the-blank form.
It is crucial to define the extent of the Sarbanes Oxley attorneys. The powers might be very restricted, such as granting someone the authority to sell your car or a piece of land while you are overseas. Or, the powers might be very broad, such as the power to buy and sell your property, lend and borrow money in your name, and so forth. The principal must determine if the Power of Attorney will take effect immediately or when something prevents him from acting himself.
 Some official procedures should be observed in keeping with the principal’s interests; the Power of Attorney must be signed in front of reliable witnesses, notarized, and recorded in court. In some cases, the Equal Dignity Rule comes into play; according to this rule of law, if you give someone your Power of Attorney to sign the papers to sell your property, and the law requires that signature on the legal document to be notarized, then your Power of Attorney authorizing that agent to sign the deed must be notarized, too.
POSTED BY sarbanesoxleylawyer AT 9/29/2008 9:21 PM
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Sarbanes Oxley Certification for IT, Risk and Compliance Professionals
The Sarbanes Oxley lawyer Institute is successfully satisfying the need of
individuals and organisations wanting international recognition of
their abilities. The Sarbanes Oxley Certification Institute has been
set up by industry experts specifically to provide an international and
acceptable measure of knowledge that an individual charged with
implementing the Sarbanes Oxley Act has to have. 
By passing the
Institutes examination, individuals demonstrate their understanding and
knowledge of all the issues required to implement all subject areas
covered/required by the Act. It is then the Sarbanes Oxley
Certification Institute’s privilege to present the very much high in
demand SOX-ITSEC Certification qualification.
The SOX lawyers
Certification Institute’s mission is to promote top end professionalism
and the best possible practices by developing and administering the
Sarbanes Oxley program. The internationally acclaimed certification is
already in high demand and candidates in the US, Europe, Asia and
Africa are already certified.
The act was initiated by US Senator
Paul Sarbanes and US Representative Michael Oxley. It came as a result
of the large financial scandals involving Worldcom, Enron, Arthur
Andersen and Global Crossing. As of 2006, all publicly traded companies
are required to submit an annual report of their effectiveness of their
internal accounting controls. Non compliance to the Sarbanes Oxley attorneys
of 2002 can be detrimental to non US businesses who have a US presence
and US companies alike.
POSTED BY sarbanesoxleylawyer AT 9/20/2008 5:51 PM
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SOX Clawback Attorneys’ Fees Recoveries
A November 20, 2006 Wall Street Journal article entitled "Companies Discover It’s Hard to Reclaim Pay from Executives" (here, subscription required) details the difficulty that companies are having in their attempts to compel executives to return compensation they didn’t really earn because, as a result of later restatements, the company didn’t actually hit the compensation triggers. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; Section 304 of the Sarbanes Oxley lawyer Act was supposed to facilitate the possibility of reclaiming bonuses from top executives when reported income is wiped out by later financial restatements. For a host of reasons, the SOX clawback provisions in Section 304 have failed to live up to their purpose:
1. The provision is poorly written: As Stanford Law School Professor Joseph Grundfest has said (here), "For a statute that contains a lot of inartfully drafted provisions, this is among the most inartful." The provision calls for the CFO or CEO to reimburse the company if an issuer has to prepare a restatement "due to material noncompliance of the issuer as a result of misconduct." However, the statute doesn’t specify what constitutes "misconduct" and it doesn’t specify whose misconduct qualifies. (Must it be the CEO’s or CFO’s own misconduct? Or is a lower level employee’s misconduct sufficient?)
Sarbanes Oxley lawyers
2. Retroactivity?: Even though the statute was enacted in 2002, restatements often reach much further back in time. For example, in connection with several of the options backdating restatements, the period of the restatement in some instances has reached back into the early nineties. The applicability of the clawback provision to compensation awarded prior to Sarbanes Oxley attorney’s enactment raises due process and other substantive concerns.
3. No "Private Right of Action": At least two federal district courts have held that there is no private right of action in Section 304. For example, in a derivative suit brought by shareholders of Stonepath Group to recover compensation paid to the company’s CEO and CFO, the court held, according to news reports (here), that Section 304 omitted a private right of action, by contrast to other sections of the Act where Congress made it clear whether or not investors explicitly had that right.
POSTED BY sarbanesoxleylawyer AT 8/30/2008 4:42 PM
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