Law Commons^™

The Appeal And Limits Of Internal Controls To Fight Fraud, Terrorism, Other Ills, Lawrence A. Cunningham

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Congress responded in similar ways to 2001's major national crises: bolstering internal controls in corporate America under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in response to Enron's debacle and imposing internal controls on its financial services industry under the USA PATRIOT Act in response to 9/11's terrorism. These reflexive legislative responses to national crisis fit a pattern of proliferating controls as a first-order policy option dating to the mid-1970s. Documenting this proliferation and untangling the definition of internal controls, this Article attributes the appeal of internal controls as a policy option to systemic forces including the movements for deregulation and cooperative compliance, resistance …