The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has voted to approve new interpretive guidelines for Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, relaxing previous guidelines which critics called inflexible, burdensome, and wasteful, notes a report on the Jurist site.

Section 404 requires public companies to continually evaluate the internal controls they have in place to ensure that external auditors provide accurate financial reports to investors. Accounting firms, which have profited from tough control standards, have supported stricter guidelines, while public corporations have argued that they impose too much of a burden on small companies. The relaxed guidelines will apply to businesses with a market value of under $75m, and will focus on areas more prone to potential fraud. US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said last November that Sarbanes-Oxley raised the cost of doing business in America and cited the decline of stock transactions since 2002 as an example of its impact.
Full report on the Jurist site