You have to hand it to Senator Chris Dodd. For someone who has heavily depended on the generosity of the largest banks and investment firms for his fund-raising, he has proposed a pretty impressive bill for further regulating the financial firms....given the current environment in Washington, of course.

I am not confident it will prevent another AIG, Lehman or Bear Stearns. The current poisoned partisanship in Washington on both sides of the aisle wouldn't support that kind of onerous bill.

Are companies making fewer accounting errors, or are executives and auditors failing to find and report them? This is the over-riding question Glass Lewis is asking in its newly issued analysis of restatements in 2009.

The governance research firm, which has been crunching this data for a number of years, found that last year, 75 companies filed 78 financial restatements to correct accounting errors. This was down 58 percent from 2008. The restatement rate literally halved to 2.5 percent in 2009 from 5 percent a year earlier.

The financial crisis was in part caused by all those people who lavishly spent money they did not have while others on Wall Street risked other people's money.

And then there was the case of Sujata Sachdeva, who also spent money she did not have but, rather, used other people's money. In her case, the practice could land her in the slammer for as much as 120 years.

The recent restatements from three puny companies-one of which faces possible delisting from Nasdaq-could reignite the debate over whether microcap companies should be required to comply with a key provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as well as highlight a showdown between the SEC and the White House and Congress.

We're talking about Section 404b of the sweeping 2002 governance legislation, which requires companies to report to the public about the effectiveness of their internal control over financial reporting. The smallest public companies with a public float below $75 million have been given four extensions to design, implement and document these internal controls before their auditors are required to attest to the effectiveness of these controls. Opponents had been whining that complying with Section 404b would be too costly for the smallest companies and drive many of them to list their shares overseas.  Alas, this never happened.