These Men Could Kill SarbOx

From the marbled corridors of Congress to the tony salons of Georgetown, liberal lawmakers are abuzz with ideas on how to rein in U.S. corporations. Yet over in the courts, two conservative lawyers are mounting a serious challenge to a law, enacted earlier in the decade, that imposed tough restrictions on American businesses. A ruling in their favor could deal a serious blow to the pro-regulatory movement in Washington.

Michael A. Carvin and Noel J. Francisco, partners at the giant law firm Jones Day, are taking on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the controversial anti-fraud legislation passed after the last big wave of corporate scandals. The two are representing Brad Beckstead, the head of a small auditing firm in Henderson, Nev., who is suing the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the panel created by SarbOx to make sure auditors are doing their jobs. Beckstead says the PCAOB picked apart his business in a grueling 2004 audit. "I became the poster boy for what not to do when auditing small companies," he says. The cost of complying with the rules was so great, he claims, that he had to abandon his auditing practice.