With Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's Committee on Capital Markets Regulation due to report its findings on Sarbanes-Oxley this week, questions are now being raised whether a SOX rollback is a good thing.

Paulson has it around the wrong way, says Bill Clinton's former Secretary of Labour Robert Reich in this piece from American Prospect.

Companies are not going private because of Sarbanes-Oxley, says Reich, but because bosses and executives are make a killing selling out to private equity.

"If Paulson thinks public companies are going private because of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, he's either naive or doesn't want you to know the truth ... Paulson says he's worried that Sarbanes-Oxley is causing public companies to go private. He's got it backwards. He ought to be worried about the real reason so many public companies are going private. It amounts to a new kind of CEO looting ... It's a scam. CEOs shouldn't be allowed to advise their directors and shareholders that a pending buyout is in their best interests and then make a bundle off the deal. If they give any advice at all, they shouldn't be allowed to remain with the firm after it goes private. If Paulson wants small investors to stay confident the market isn't rigged against them, he should not seek to weaken Sarbanes-Oxley. To the contrary, he should expand the law to prevent this new form of CEO looting."

At the same time, questions are being asked the downturn in IPOs, purportedly as a result of Sarbanes-Oxley, is necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, it might even be a good thing, writes Herb Greenberg in The Wall Street Journal.

"Seriously, maybe some of these companies shouldn't go public in the first place, especially if they fear or don't want to pay for laws that are attempting to crack down on skullduggery ... Compared with the boom of the 1990s, the IPO market isn't so hot. But think about it: Based on everything we've been hearing lately, there's more money earmarked for untested private companies than there are places to put it. That's right: The very entities that may be looking to the public markets for an exit tomorrow - Sarbanes-Oxley or no Sarbanes-Oxley - are gobbling up risky-ish deals that otherwise might go public today. That, in turn, makes laws like Sarbanes-Oxley not just a good thing for investors, but a convenient scapegoat, as well."

As Greenberg points out, it isn't like the US market for IPOs has withered up and died. According to Thomson Financial, 172 companies went public this year, raising a combined $38.8 billion. That compares with 213 offerings in all of last year, which rang up $38.5 billion. Hardly a slowdown, and the year isn't over yet.

Questions are also being raised whether Paulson is politically naive.

Paulson is refreshing but so far, he hasn't shown that he's actually bringing anything new to the table, writes Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post.

Being sensible, says Pearlstein, is simply not enough and Paulson might be confusing public interest with the interests of Wall Street. They're not necessarily the same thing. And it's politically naive, to boot.

"Certainly it is possible that financial services are moving offshore because of the greater hassles of U.S. regulation. But it is equally plausible that what we're seeing is the inevitable end to near-monopoly that has allowed U.S. financial firms to charge outrageous fees and earn outsized salaries and bonuses. A more seasoned Washington hand would have taken care to point out that if government has no business protecting the jobs of auto workers who price themselves out of world markets, it certainly has no business protecting millionaire investment bankers and hedge-fund managers."