Extraterritorial impacts of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on external corporate governance - Current evidence from a German perspective

Abstract

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) has not only had tremendous impact on the U.S corporate governance system, but also on other countries with companies subject to SOX. The paper analyzes the major direct impacts of SOX on the European Union (EU) and Germany as a Member State. The focus of the analysis is on rules concerning external corporate governance instruments, i.e. the auditing professions' oversight, auditors' independence and auditing standards. Additionally, the paper investigates whether the contemporary regulatory activities in the EU and Germany concerning external corporate governance can be explained as indirect institutional consequences of SOX. Although the EU Commission says for the record that it has an own long-term strategy of modernizing corporate governance, the paper demonstrates that several rules of SOX quite obviously served as a model for the EU regulatory activities. The same phenomenon can be observed for the new German regulations of external corporate governance.