President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness has some promising job-growth ideas, including ways to speed up projects in energy and infrastructure.
But the 27-member council -- made up mostly of corporate executives, along with a handful of investors, labor leaders and academics -- has indulged in outrageous special pleading with its assault on Sarbanes-Oxley, the antifraud law passed in 2002 in response to Enron, WorldCom and the dot-com bust.
Along with several sensible proposals, a recently issued report says that "nearly all" council members want Congress to end important accounting and auditing safeguards in Sarbanes-Oxley, claiming they make it unduly difficult for companies to raise money from investors, impeding their ability to grow and hire.
Watering down Sarbanes-Oxley has long been a goal of corporate America, despite studies by the Securities and Exchange Commission showing that the law has reduced errors and fraud, and that changes to the law have made it easier for companies to comply.
As for the supposed barriers to investment, history is rife with companies that cooked their books to lure investors and created jobs in the short run, before imploding and causing mass joblessness.
Anything-goes markets are great for investors who get out before the jig is up, or who get bailed out when their bets go bad. They are a raw deal for everyone else.
Specifically, the report calls for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley to be made voluntary for public companies worth less than $1 billion.
That would relieve some 6,000 companies -- or 75 percent of all publicly traded companies -- from various requirements, including the rule that corporate boards have independent audit committees, that corporate executives attest to the accuracy of the company's financial statements, and that bonuses based on fraudulent statements be subject to clawback.
