Congressman Tom Feeney is telling everyone who cares to listen that Sarbanes-Oxley is driving companies away from the United States and that foreign companies that once would have listed in the US, the world's biggest capital market, are now choosing places like London and Hong Kong instead, all because of the US corporate governance regime.

For more details about his claims, check this report.

You have to put these claims in some sort of perspective. The biggest market for IPOs by value remains the new york stock exchange. And the picture seems to be a lot more complicated than what Feeney suggests.

Truth be told, there are many reasons why some companies are not listing in the US, and Sarbanes-Oxley is only one.

The main reason why companies are choosing to list overseas is because of the fees charged by Wall Street investment banks, writes Alan Murray in The Wall Street Journal.

The banks, he says, charge 6.5 to 7 per cent of the value of the shares offered, compared with 3 to 4 per cent in Europe and even lower in Asia.

You can read the full WSJ piece here.

An extension of the argument comes from Daniel Gross in Slate.

Apart from the fees, Gross also blames the fees paid to lawyers, accountants, printers and investor relations professionals. And as he says, with all the wealth, experience, and infrastructure around the world, IPOs are now becoming a commodity, and when you're dealing with commodities, you are competing on price.

As former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Harvey Pitt says in this interview here, the forces of globalisation have changed everything,

"The fact is that dynamics in the marketplace are making the issue of where a company has its stock listed largely irrelevant. What's much more relevant is who owns it. What we've seen is that the Sarbanes-Oxley standard is effectively becoming the de facto world standard and therefore, I'm less concerned that we're going to lose listings".

There's no doubt that Sarbanes-Oxley would be a deterrent for some companies wanting to list, particularly the smaller ones.

But let's not get carried away. It's only one of many reasons driving the change.