And so, as expected, the Securities and Exchange Commission's advisory committee has given draft recommendations exempting thousands of small companies from key parts of Sarbanes-Oxley the big tick . Here is the committee's final report. And now the work begins.

The recommendations have to be accepted by the SEC's five commissioners and some have expressed reservations about whether a complete exemption is like cracking a walnut with mallet.

The SEC won't act until after it holds a joint roundtable discussion with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board on May 10, which means the lobbying and debate will heat up over the next few weeks.

As Marketplace Public Radio reports, getting it past the SEC might turn out to be as easy as opening an oyster with a bus ticket.

For a start, there's the question whether the SEC has the power to exempt small companies from Section 404 compliance. You'll find a good summary all this at Bill Sjostrom's Truth On The Market blog.

As the Economist points out in the piece The Trial of Sarbanes-Oxley, an alternative might be to tailor Section 404 down to fewer internal controls that look at material risks to a firm's financial reports.

No doubt, there'll be plenty of words about all this in the lead up to May 10.