law.com - Article

law.com - Article: "With Charity for All?
Ashby Jones
Corporate Counsel
01-26-2005


In early 2003, Barron 'Buzz' Tenny, the executive vice president and general counsel of the New York-based Ford Foundation, sat down with the text of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the 2002 corporate governance reform law passed in the wake of the Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. meltdowns. The law primarily applies to public companies, but two provisions in it were also incorporated into the criminal section of the United States code: the expanded protections for internal whistleblowers and new standards on document retention. Tenny thought that other sections of the law might make sense for his organization too, such as the requirement that audit committee members are completely 'independent' -- governance-speak for no business ties with the foundation. "