Big US companies say sarbanes-oxley compliance costs seem to be declining with 94 per cent expecting them to either remain the same, or decrease for 2006, according to the latest Business Roundtable corporate governance survey. In other words, only 6 per cent claimed SOX costs were going up.

According to the survey, companies with estimated compliance costs of $10 million dropped from 47 per cent to 40 per cent.

This is pretty much in line with findings from AMR Research which has a table showing that projected Sarbanes-Oxley costs are pretty much in line with the previous year, and if anything will slip down a little. AMR figures also tell us that SOX is just a fraction of the total compliance bill for business.

Not that this will stop the push to unwind SOX, something I blogged on nearly a fortnight ago. The public policy group, the Committee for Economic Development, has now come out urging regulators to give Sarbanes-Oxley more time. Requirements imposed by Section 404 can be tailored to meet requirements of smaller businesses, but it says there should be no broad exemption.

Still, the roundtable findings are not surprising. Big business has the cash and resources to deal with compliance. The problem with Sarbanes-Oxley is that the burden is not necessarily evenly distributed.

Some other interesting bits in the survey. At least 91 per cent of companies have an independent chairman, lead director or presiding director, up significantly on the 71 per cent two years ago, and 69 per cent of companies said their independent directors met in executive session at every board meeting, compared with 55 per cent back in 2003.

So are companies taking governance more seriously in response to pressure from shareholders, regulators and unions? Well, yes and no. As Charles Elson, director of the University of Delaware's Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance told USA Today , companies have made progress "but we still have a long way to go." One example, he said, was executive pay. Sure the survey shows pay-for-performance has increased (57 per cent versus 40 per cent in 2004), but the bigger question is what are the hurdles. Has the bar been lowered?

Another sign that there's a long way to go is in the area of director evaluations. The survey reveals that 45 per cent of companies plan to perform individual director evaluations in 2006. True, it's better than the 27 per cent who did this in 2004 but it's still less than half. In other words, more than half the people who are entrusted to run companies aren't actually being monitored to assess how good a job they are doing. That's hardly reassuring. There's enormous room for improvement in boardrooms.