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September 28, 2007
NY Times to Be Hoisted on Sarbox Petard?
The Enron and WorldCom scandals provided moonbats with an opportunity to stick it to the capitalist system that makes our standard of living possible and that they so detest. They imposed the draconian Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which costs the business world $billions upon $billions per year to comply with absurdly extraneous punitive regulations. Even leftists like Nancy Pelousy and Schmuck Schumer admit that Sarbox burdens are excessive. But the quasi-Marxist New York Times loves it.
As American Thinker observes, the Gray Lady may get a taste of her own medicine. The recent debacle in which the Times granted a $77,508 discount to fellow moonbats at MoveOn.org on a disgraceful full-page ad sliming General Petraeus, admittedly in violation of its own policy, was an example of a "material weakness" in its internal controls. Sarbox-decreed punishments for not discovering such weaknesses and documenting them for the appropriate bureauweenies range up to 20 years in prison.
Jail punk would make a fitting second career for Times Publisher Pinch Sulzberger, don't you think?
The Gray Lady's blues don't end there. American Thinker also notes that Rupert Murdoch, who just acquired the Wall Street Journal, is already positioning himself to steal the Times' advertisers. Bankruptcy specialist Edward Altman devised the Z score to measure the risk of corporate bankruptcy. The lower the score, the more trouble a company is in. A score of 1.8 is "considered the upper bound of distress." WaPo's score is 4.118. The Times' score: 1.835. Time to start looking for a life raft.
Although Pinch is unfortunately unlikely to wind up in jail, he's unlikely to be running the Times for long either. Any White Knight stepping in to save the sinking paper would need a whole lot of money and politics acceptable to the Sulzberger/Ochs family. Candidates include Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and any number of people from Dubai.
On tips from Byron.
Posted by Van Helsing at September 28, 2007 7:37 AM
Comments
Michael Moore would also be a good candidate.
Posted by: Pam at September 28, 2007 8:03 AM
Ahhh, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. This act has caused me to do a good bit of extra and quite pointless work. It's a nuisance as far as I'm concerned, but it's probably also very costly as well on the corporate level.
Posted by: forest at September 28, 2007 8:23 AM
Ah Sarbax, as a SOX consultant my income has improved dramatically over the past three years. I'm probably biased, but I think it does a lot of good in preventing both financial statement fraud and asset fraud. But then, I may be one of the few people who actually understand it.
If SOX is that expensive, you probably didn't think it through very well before implementing it.
Posted by: Gary Waltrip at September 28, 2007 8:50 AM
Yeah, trial lawyers are generally pretty happy with ridiculous tort awards, too.
Posted by: V the K at September 28, 2007 10:13 AM
I agree Gary, you're probably biased because you are one of the few who make more rather than less money due to the new regs. Here's the other side of the coin from from your web page:
"Complying with the requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is an expensive proposition, often adding several millions of dollars to your annual audit requirements."
Posted by: forest at September 28, 2007 2:36 PM
A more apropos title for the picture would be: "Pinch charts a course for oblivion".
Posted by: pocomoco at September 28, 2007 4:42 PM
Or: Pinch, going down with his ship.
Posted by: Kevin at September 29, 2007 4:34 AM
Glad to hear the Gray Lady is doing so poorly, hopefully it will end up the same way as the ill-fated Air-America did...just goes to show when you have liberal kooks running (or should that be "ruining") a company that their liberal ideology and liberal spending habits always end up sinking a company.
Posted by: Ludwig Van Beethoven at September 29, 2007 5:16 AM
