Sarbanes-Oxley has been successful in enabling higher levels of accountability throughout publicly-held companies mainly as a result of re-defining core processes as they relate to financial reporting and disclosure of events, both positive and negative that impacts a company's financial performance.
Sarbanes-Oxley for SOX as it is sometimes referred to is considered by many to be the "snapping back into place" of ethics in business after the Enron, MCI, Tyco and many other corporate scandals that rocked the markets of the world in 2001 and forward. In today's environment the SEC would most assuredly be focused on and demand greater visibility into how these write-downs either lead to written down and obsolete products, or the selling off of older-generation products on cents on...
Given the intense focus on corporate accountability and standards, and the widespread fraud that has been found in both public and private corporations, the exact status of the written down inventory would need to be known to the asset tag level. The Cisco write-down, if done in 2006, would be much more closely monitored and evaluated for potential fraud from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
References
Krantz (2001) - Tech firms stand to gain from write-offs. USA Today Newspaper. July 16, 2001.
Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002) - U.S. Senators Sarbanes and Oxley. Passed in 2002 by both U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. Text viewed on the Internet on July 22, 2006:
http://www.aicpa.org/info/sarbanes_oxley_summary.htm
