O impacto da Lei Sarbanes-Oxley na governança corporativa e seus reflexos nas demonstrações financeiras

Abstract

This research was developed with the goal of identifying the main impacts of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 in the corporate governance and their reflexes in the financial statements of firms as measured by the announced restatements presented by the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), an American organ equivalent to the Securities Exchange Commission (CVM) in Brazil. To perform this work, besides the theoretical study of SOX, a review of 11 years of data was done, with the objective of analyzing the years before and after the SOX act, within the SEC, universities and American commercial entities that conduct studies of data and indexes. To perform the analysis and understand the collected information, graphics and commentaries of the obtained information were utilized. As methodology, the work is characterized as a research exploratory-descriptive of a qualitative nature. From the data, it was possible to conclude that SOX was an answer from the American government to the accounting scandals in the financial statements, mainly from Enron and WorldCom in 2002. The emphasis on better practices of corporate governance and an increased rigor on the part of the regulating organs, forced firms to become more transparent in their financial statements. This rigor can be verified by the increase of restatements occurred after SOX, in which the reaction of the market is not negative, allowing the conclusion that in the first years of the existence of SOX was associated to the volatility of the market, while during the later years, it was understood that the restatements as a search for more transparency by the firms.