“SOX” is an acronym for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. IT is named after the co-sponsors Senator Paul Sarbanes and Representative Michael G. Oxley. It is also known as the “Public Company Accounting Reform & Investor Protection Act”, or the “Corporate & Auditing Accountability & Responsibility Act”. This bill was enacted as a reaction to several major corporate and accounting scandals (Enron & World Com). Besides setting civil and criminal penalties for securities violations, it also set new systems of certification of internal audits.
In a nutshell, this law applies to all public companies and regulates corporate responsibility, accounting practices & financial statements.
Part of corporate accountability is to accurately represent all physical assets of the company. The best and most transparent way to account for all corporate assets is to “tag” them. A bar-code or serialized asset tag achieves this goal in a very cost effective way. Can an unscrupulous corporation “game” the system? Sure, but one solution to that is a customized security asset tag that cab be serialized or bar-coded or both and will leave a visible imprint on the asset that is difficult to remove.
Public corporations may be the only ones subject to this law, but accurately accounting for physical assets benefits non-public companies too. Recently we had a customer that leases work tables to other companies both in the US and Europe. He ordered serialized aluminum asset tags in several languages in order to keep track of his products here and abroad.
So, if you are a company, either public or private, large or small, with a fair amount of physical assets, it is in your best interest ot tag all of them. Remember, the IRS is also watching!