Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

STATEMENTS ON INTRODUCED BILLS AND JOINT RESOLUTIONS -- (Senate - March 09, 2007)

By Mr. HATCH (for himself and Mr. BENNETT):

S. 832. A bill to provide for the sale of approximately 25 acres of public land to the Turnabout Ranch, Escalante, Utah, at fair market value; to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I rise to introduce legislation that would correct a property trespass question involving a 25-acre parcel of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in Garfield County, UT. The parcel is part of the Turnabout Ranch, which hosts a successful and popular program to rehabilitate troubled youth.

The trespass conflict is the result of an erroneous survey in January 1999, at the time the Congress approved a major land exchange, P.L. 105-335, between the State of Utah and the BLM and erroneously included a part of the Turnabout Ranch. The land is located along the border of the Grand Staircase Escalante (GSE) Monument. My bill makes a slight boundary change to resolve the trespass question. This would grant the owners of the ranch the opportunity to purchase the erroneously surveyed land at fair market value so that this very important program for at-risk youth can continue unhindered.

Since 1995, Turn-About Ranch has graduated some 500 troubled and at-risk teenagers through an intense program of training and rehabilitation. The ranch employs about 35 Garfield County residents. The Turn-About Ranch program has strong support from the local community and the Garfield Country Commission.

Historically used for agriculture and grazing purposes, the ranch was purchased by the Townsend Family who leased the land to Turn-About Ranch, Inc., for the exclusive purpose of restoring dignity and self-esteem to wayward teenagers. Because government-owned land administered by the BLM surrounds the private land, the only way to resolve the trespass is for the Congress to pass legislation.

This legislation offers a simple and fair solution to a fairly technical problem on our public lands. I hope Congress can use this legislation to resolve this problem in the very near future.

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By Mr. HATCH:

S. 834. A bill to require annual testimony before Congress by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, relating to efforts to promote transparency in financial reporting; to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce a bill that would take a small but significant step toward identifying and repairing some of the regulatory problems currently found in our country's financial markets.

In 2002, our financial markets were in serious trouble. In the wake of Enron and other prominent accounting scandals, the public's confidence in the markets was low. Investors expressed their lack of confidence by taking their money out of the stock market, and the market indices plummeted. In response to this crisis--and that is exactly what it was, a crisis--Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

The law did what it was designed to do--re-establish faith in our financial markets--but it came at a cost. Complying with several of the bill's provisions has increased significantly the costs of doing business as a public corporation. Many large corporations continue to spend millions of dollars every year in order to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley law. This, they can afford. However, many smaller firms have found the costs of compliance with the Act to be crushing, burdensome, and negatively affecting their ability to compete in a global marketplace.

The result of this problem is twofold. First, a good number of smaller, publicly traded firms have been taken private by investors, with others expected to meet this same fate. Second, we have seen fewer companies going public, at least in the United States. During the year 2000, 50 percent of all new Initial Public Offerings, IPOs, were done in the United States. By 2006 that number had fallen below 10 percent. In 2006, Hong Kong supplanted New York as the number one market for stock offerings world-wide.

A number of my colleagues have pointed out that the dearth of IPOs threatens our standing as the premier financial market in the world. In the short term, we worry about this costing us prestige and jobs, but the real costs are much, much greater. Businesses that want to keep growing eventually need to become publicly-traded corporations in order to raise sufficient capital. With the costs of crossing that threshold greatly higher than they were a few years ago, many companies either delay or forego becoming a publicly traded corporation. Companies that become or remain privately-held firms eventually run into capital constraints of some sort that limit their growth.

The resulting cost to our economy is a financial market where it is more difficult for corporations to raise sufficient capital to expand capacity or increase productivity, ultimately resulting in slower economic growth. Given the truly awesome problems we face in the upcoming years with regard to our unfunded entitlement obligations, we are going to need every bit of economic growth we can muster to satisfy them. Even those who are ambivalent about the benefits of economic growth on the standard of living of all Americans should appreciate its importance in meeting our future obligations.

The bill I am introducing today would help us to identify and, I hope, ultimately address, many of the regulatory problems facing our financial markets. Specifically, it requires the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and the Chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to annually testify to the relevant Senate and House committees on their efforts to reduce complexity in financial reporting and to provide more accurate and clear financial information to investors. I expect that this requirement would result in more awareness of these problems by policymakers in the Legislative and Executive Branches, as well as in the private sector, along with suggested solutions to these challenges.

While this bill would be a relatively small step, I believe it can help us understand exactly what must be done to address what ails our financial markets and help us achieve a consensus on how to fix these problems.

Mr. President, a nearly identical bill was passed by the House of Representatives recently with no opposition. I urge the leadership of the Senate on both sides of the aisle, along with the members of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs to support this bill, and join the House in making this important step toward increasing the efficiency of our financial markets.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

There being no objection, the text of the bill was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:

S. 834

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