Usha Rodrigues and Mike Stegemoller have penned an interesting article, “Placebo Ethics,” assessing the effect of one of SOX’s disclosure provisions: The required immediate disclosure of waivers from a company’s code of ethics, found in Section 406 of the law. The article is concrete, informative, empirical and well-written.
The article’s abstract summarizes the heart of the paper:
Out of 200 randomly selected firms, we found only one waiver over 4 years disclosed pursuant to Section 406. However, by exploiting an overlap in disclosure regulations [between SOX 406 and Item 404 of Regulation S-K requiring disclosure of related-party transactions in year-end proxy statements], we were able to cross check our sample companies’ waiver disclosure. We find 30 instances where companies appear to be violating the law, and another 74 where companies evade illegality by watering down their codes to an arguably impermissible degree – their codes of ethics do not forbid the same Enron-style conflicts of interest that led to the adoption of Section 406 in the first place. Finally we study all waivers filed by all public companies with the SEC in the four years following SOX’s passage – and find only 36 total. Event studies reveal that the market generally does not react to these transactions, suggesting that companies only use waivers to disclose innocuous, immaterial information.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, including the conclusions that 15% of the sample firms are apparently violating the law and that the waivers that are disclosed are viewed by the market as irrelevant. It is also interesting that 37% of the sample “evade illegality by watering down their codes to an arguably impermissible degree.” It is this latter claim on which I want to focus.
I talked a bit about this issue in my Hydraulic Theory of Disclosure article. In the article I said this about the waiver disclosure requirement:
The implicit assumption is that disclosure to shareholders will deter inappropriate waivers, inducing better compliance with the underlying code of ethics. But that assumption must be animated by a further assumption that some conduct will be relatively static—that codes of ethics will not themselves be re-written and relaxed in response to the rule. In fact, however, the more likely outcome is that codes of ethics will be (and have been) re-written in order to minimize the need for waivers, in the event actually stemming rather than improving the flow of information . . . . In other words, disclosed waivers are (privately) costly, and it may be less (privately) costly to amend codes of ethics than to seek and publicize waivers. Underlying behavior of the sort requiring waivers may not change, or it may even deteriorate. And either way less of it will be disclosed.
Rodrigues’ and Stegemoller’s (R&S’s) concluision seems to be 1) that immediate disclosure of related-party transactions would be a good thing, 2) that SOX 406 intended this but was poorly-executed to achieve the result, and 3) that companies’ failure to disclose waivers of their codes of ethics for related-party transactions is a violation of SOX 406, even where the code does not explicitly prohibit such transactions.
While the abstract quoted above is somewhat circumspect about the illegality of these “in spirit” violations of SOX 406, the article itself is a bit more hard-nosed:
It may be that, by omitting related-party transactions from their codes of ethics, companies are in violation of Section 406(c)(1), because prohibiting related-party transactions is “reasonably necessary” to promote “ethical handling of actual or apparent conflicts of interest between personal and professional relationships.” At the very least, these codes violate the intention, or “spirit” of Section 406’s disclosure requirements. As discussed in Part III, Section 406’s waiver provision was specifically enacted to address Enron’s related-party transactions with its CFO, Andy Fastow. Yet the majority of our sample companies do not forbid related-party transactions in their codes.
Instead, companies tend to have generic “conflicts of interest” provisions. And even when the provisions address related-party transactions, they use “weasel wording” that makes it hard to find an actual violation.
As R&S note, most ethics codes do not prohibit related-party transactions outright, so neither waivers of these codes, nor, therefore, disclosure of waivers, is required. While seemingly proving my prediction that the effect of SOX 406 would be watered-down codes of ethics and, thus, less disclosure of information (assuming the watering down came in response to SOX 406), R&S focus instead on the illegality point, with which I have some trouble.
Basically, R&S argue that ethics codes that do not prohibit related party transactions are, in fact, impermissible under SOX, but I find their reasoning to be a stretch, and certainly there is no case law or SEC ruling (that I know of or that they cite) supporting the claim. The R&S argument goes, in essence: a) a firm has an ethics code, waivers of which must be disclosed immediately; b) the code “should” prohibit related-party transactions but it does not on its face; c) there is a related-party transaction; d) there is no disclosure of a waiver; e) 406 is violated because the code of ethics “should” have prohibited this transaction, thus it “should” have required a waiver, and thus the absence of disclosure of a waiver is a violation of 406. This seems like a pretty big stretch to me. It might be that firms are interpreting 406 liberally, but it’s a long way from that to saying they are breaking the law. Rather, I would say that failure to disclose waivers in this case is not an example of a firm flouting its obligation under SOX, it is instead an example of the predictable (and predicted) hydraulic effect of imperfect regulation.
This would still count as a failure of SOX 406, in my book (whether that’s a bad thing or not is another matter), but not because of non-enforcement, as R&S suggest, but rather because of the perverse incentive created by SOX 406 that induces firms to enact less-restrictive ethics codes.
In the end, I see the article as a vindication of my prediction. My point was to suggest that SOX 406 would have the opposite effect of the one it intended–less internal prohibition (or policing) by firms of “unethical” conduct and less disclosure of such conduct. I hasten to note that this study doesn’t say anything about whether SOX had anything to do with the watered-down ethics codes; for all I know they were already watered down (and thus the accuracy of my prediction is unconfirmed by the article). But that would have been the thing to look at, it seems to me: The role of SOX in inducing firms to engage in disfavored conduct to avoid new disclosure obligations that they would not otherwise have engaged in.
Despite this critique, I think the article is the best sort of empirical legal scholarship. My conclusion might diverge from R&S’s (I would not suggest, as they do, a rule simply requiring disclosure of all related-party transactions over a certain size), but the evidence they uncover is important and their presentation of it is straightforward, well-written and informative.