This week's Supreme Court decision striking down part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act affects only a very narrow part of the law, and leaves the larger issues of SOX regulation untouched. It won't have any affect on regulated companies.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

In terms of changing the way companies operate, "essentially this is a non-event," said Charles Elson, a director at HealthSouth Corp. and director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. "You've got this oversight vehicle over the accounting profession that remains, and you've got this significant regulatory structure around the auditing process that remains.

He addd that governance experts had wondered: "Would they knock the whole thing out? And obviously they chose not to."

In a 5-4 decision, the court upheld a lawsuit by the Free Enterprise Fund against the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a nonprofit organization created in 2002 to oversee the firms that audit publicly traded company. Instead of ruling on the merits of Sarbanes-Oxley, "the court struck down only the part that said the Securities and Exchange Commission needs good cause to remove board members. The court said the SEC has the power to remove board members at will," according to the Washington Post.

The decison could prove significant in that it calls into question the independence of government officials in agencies including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Social Security Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission.

But for companies regulated by SOX, it's the same old same old.