Sustainability and Corporate Governance

5

Audit Committee

In the wake of the criticisms of auditors and their corporate oversees for their failures during the financial debacles of the late 1990s and early 2000s, board-level audit committees of public companies became the foundation of many aspects of a new corporate governance scheme and emerged as the most important of the board committees. Under pressure from investors and consumers, Congress passed, and the President signed, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) which, among other things, included Section 301 amending Section 10A of the Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (Exchange Act),¹ to require that the SEC promulgate rules directing the national securities exchanges and national securities associations to prohibit the listing ...