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The US Vice President Dick Cheney has revealed that the White House would be willing to lighten the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, after admitting that the measure could be considered to have gone 'too far'. The decision came a month after Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, began to meet bank executives to discuss regulatory concerns, and appeared to confirm a broader shift in American policy towards a watering down of the Sarbanes-Oxley rules.

Cheney has reportedly said that,"I think you can make a case that Sarbanes-Oxley went too far. The fact of the matter is, the things—when we had, for example, Enron and WorldCom, the problems that developed from the standpoint of those companies, those activities were illegal before there was any additional regulation put in place."

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was introduced in 2002 in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals, but it will become more vulnerable from November because the Act’s co-authors—the Democrat Senator Paul Sarbanes and the Republican Michael Oxley—are stepping down.

Separately, Christopher Cox, chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, said yesterday that Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires companies to disclose more about their internal financial controls, and their outside auditors to issue opinions on the controls, has been costlier than expected.

"The law, in some respects, has been too expensive for investors", Cox told reporters at a conference on corporate accounting of share options. The SEC chief said he expected to receive before the end of the year a recommendation on how to fine-tune Section 404.

The current issue of the SDA Asia Magazine has an article on Sarbanes Oxley and SOA. It delineates the security and compliance challenges in Open Architecture. Given the current trends in international commerce, compliance and computing, the information technology professional’s version of the ancient Chinese curse would surely have to be, 'May you live in integrated times'. Advances in application integration, of which Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is perhaps the most revolutionary, promise a host of business advantages from an IT perspective. Yet, they also introduce several new security and compliance risks that must be dealt with if businesses are to benefit from the new technology. Using a supply chain management example, this article examines the mix of potential benefits and security and compliance risks that SOA introduces to a business.