Modern OSS (version 4) has support for 24 and 32 bit formats [1]. Alsa's OSS emulation also supports them since 2.6.24 [2]. FreeBSD's OSS implementation supported them since 2005[3]. It would be nice if SoX would follow and support these formats as well.
[1] http://manuals.opensound.com/developer/formats.html
Unfortunately, they didn't update soundcard.h, but since the values are known, oss.c can define them as well. #ifndef AFMT_S24_LE #define ... etc.
[3] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/sys/soundcard.h.diff?r1=1.44;r2=1.45