The Sarbanes-Oxley Debacle

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) emerged from the spectacular crashes of Enron, WorldCom, and other corporations after the bursting of the dot.com stock market bubble. Enron and WorldCom became poster children for the supposed "Separation of ownership and control" problems first publicized seventy years earlier by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means and echoed by generations of corporate scholars ever since. After the millennial frauds, the usual proponents of reform argued for regulation that would restore "Investor confidence" in the securities markets. Congress responded with the most sweeping federal securities legislation since the original laws in 1933 and 1934.