WOLSELEY became the latest British business to reveal the regulatory cost of its US listing when the building supplies company reported that it would cost about £5 million in advisory fees to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance laws.

But Wolseley, which has 20 staff working on SarbanesOxley compliance in addition to KPMG as an external adviser, is one of only 113 UK companies with a dual US listing that are rushing to prepare their businesses for the new laws.

In total the companies, which include Barclays, British Airways, Diageo and Royal Bank of Scotland, are expected to spend up to $350 million (£188 million) to comply with the laws, according to the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA).

GlaxoSmithKline, Abbey National, HSBC, Prudential and National Grid Transco are also required to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, as is any company that files quarterly reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) because it trades bonds or shares in the form of American depository receipts (ADRs) in the US.

Wolseley joins firms such as British Telecom and BP in revealing the multimillion-pound cost of complying with section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires every listed US company to admit to any shortcomings that could potentially lead to inaccurate reporting.

BP has said it would cost about $125 million to comply, while British Telecom has put the figure at about £10 million. MmO2 plans to pull out of the US to save about £2.5 million of compliance costs, and lastminute.com has also said it would delist from the New York Stock Exchange because it was prohibitively expensive.

If US companies are anything to go by, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is also a big drain on staff time. US public companies expect their staff to spend an average of 25,667 hours preparing for the laws, with external staff putting in a further 5,037 hours, according to an article to be published next week in Accounting & Business, ACCA’s magazine.

In Britain the accountancy firm Ernst & Young has recruited about 80 dedicated staff to work on Sarbanes-Oxley, while firms such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers and BDO Stoy Hayward are reporting double-digit growth in revenues because of increases in advisory work on the new laws.

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