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European SOX Compliance After <i>McDonald's</i> and <i>Wal-Mart</i>

By Donald C. Dowling, Jr.
October 27, 2005

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), at '301 and '406, affirmatively requires SOX-regulated companies to set up anonymous hotlines or other mechanisms that encourage employees to “whistleblow” on co-workers who commit financial, auditing, or accounting frauds. For multinationals, this seemingly-simple rule raises an international law issue that has mushroomed into a vital concern: How does SOX's hotline requirement apply to employees abroad?

American multinationals subject to SOX tend to offer their foreign employees an extension of their stateside SOX policy and hotline. The standard SOX policy requires employees to report co-worker audit/accounting frauds using a telephone, e-mail or postal mail hotline that accepts anonymous tips.

These policies, of course, are an excellent practice ' from a SOX-compliance standpoint. Unfortunately, they now raise problems under laws in Europe. The conflict crescendoed last May and June, when a French data agency struck down McDonald's SOX policy on data privacy grounds just as a German labor court, virtually simultaneously, threw out Wal-Mart's SOX policy on completely different labor law grounds.

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