I recently remembered an old joke. Older than me probably. This is how it goes.
An old gatekeeper, watching the great warehouses of a well known seaport was doing his job one day, making sure that no merchandise is smuggled out of the warehouse. A truck stops at the gate, and the driver rolls down the window. “Can I search your truck?” the gatekeeper asks. “knock yourself out” comes the answer. The gatekeeper climbs up, finds nothing and lets the driver go promptly.
The next day, the same driver stops by. “May I search?”, “sure, go ahead”. Search, nothing, good-bye.
The next day the conversation changes slightly when the gatekeeper becomes suspicious. After the search is concluded, he asks the driver point blank: “Are you smuggling anything here?”, the driver says: “of course not, I don’t know what you’re talking about”.
These exchanges go on for months, until one day when they meet, the gatekeeper says to the driver that he is retiring, and that in fact, that day was his last. The driver wishes him all the best and is about to leave the port. Suddenly, the gatekeeper says to driver: “you know, I’ve been suspecting you for some time now. Today is my last day, I promise not to tell. Please tell me, what is it that you were smuggling out of here?”. The driver thinks for a minute or two, then says: “Trucks, my friend, trucks”…
In 2002, following quite a few corporate accounting scandals (Enron, Adelphia and WorldCom to name a few), resulting in significant shareholder losses, the American government came up with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (more). The government, correctly realizing that someone has to stop corporates from using creative accounting in order to beautify their balance sheets, not to mention embezzlement. Assets were fishy, debts were hidden in piles of numbers, revenues were engineered to look better than they really were. Sarbanes-Oxley was created, and placed anywhere between 10-20% overhead in corporate management overhead. Compliance was not optional. Resistance was futile.
The young gatekeeper, Sarbanes-Oxley, kept asking corporate America for permission to search. Search permission was promptly granted. There was suspicion in the air. When finally the question was asked: “please tell me, what is it that you’re stealing here?”, the answer came: “the economy, my friend, the economy”.
It seems to me that while the gatekeeper was watching for peanuts, someone came in with trucks and stole complete economies. While trucks were being searched, someone took off with the entire seaport, and the ocean too.
And no. It ain’t over yet.
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