Canadian business leaders have experienced a dramatic rise in confidence in the accounting firms servicing publicly traded companies. Over the past two years COMPAS has been tracking confidence in accounting firms through this business panel and confidence levels dropped sharply in July 2002, a week following the WorldCom scandal. Confidence in these accounting firms has returned to pre-WorldCom levels.

The Sarbanes Oxley Act, the US legislative response to the WorldCom corruption that includes stricter reporting and accounting regulations, enjoys strong favour among respondents. Business leaders give extraordinarily high scores to the five principal tenets of the Act and disagree with those who say the internal control report is too much to reasonably ask of business. Similarly, respondents agree that since WorldCom, Enron, and Nortel, the internal control report is necessary to regain investor confidence.

These are the key findings from the current websurvey of CEOs and other business leaders conducted by COMPAS for publication in the Financial Post under the sponsorship for BDO Dunwoody and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

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