To be honest, would you trust as a CEO on your local developer skills? As mentioned in the article: There is no one on earth who could guarantee the correctness of billion lines of code. Even a control system that checks the output of the several systems is an IT system with the typical behavior. To cut a long story short. There is and will no 100 % reliability. Only by optimizing the overall process definition - including the IT - will end up in a more reliable financial reporting. The discussion here sounds for me a bit like a new scare monger to sell new products and IT services. For sure, one big optimization potential is in the area of today used paper based forms. As I''ve seen in my day to day business this is one of the essential points of failure and costs. There is no ability to check thousands of reports, orders or other incorrect filled paper based forms. Therefore the process needs to start where the data comes in. By comparing the failure rate of the up to 30 years old back end systems with the failure rate in transmission and multiple entering of information will show a totally new picture. That''s where an intelligent integration of all data sources  including manually entered data  will bring some benefit and minimize the risks. Having only the developers and systems onside will perhaps add 5 % more safeness to an undefined percentage of reliability. It''s now time for the CEO to get the overall business process and the corresponding financial reporting under better control.

"But, what do we need developers for?" --Extremely Intelligent Award-winning President of Billion-dollar Enterprise

Caveat: I''m no lawyer.

The Enron scandal broke well before Sarbanes-Oxley, and in fact was one of several scandals that precipitated it -- I would''ve thought that, as the crimes were committed prior to this law being enacted, that the perpetrators would not be prosecuted/sentenced under this law, but rather under previously existing securities/corporate governance statutes.
Further, most of what I''ve seen on Sarbanes-Oxley (from a citizen - i.e. non-business point of view) refers to the law as rather toothless, a ''slap on the wrist'' for corportions that misbehave.

Of course, the reason for placing this article in JDJ is it''s relevance for state-side software developers. I agree that implementation will initially require state-side development resources.

Whether such developer positions remain state-side depends entirely on costs vs. benefits to the corporation. I don''t see anything in the article to suggest that these positions wouldn''t be outsourced after version 1.0 systems are up and running.