By David Wyld, Contributing Editor

If we put together a “Business Hall of Shame”, some of the first inductees would have to include the likes of Chairmen and CEOs behaving badly, such as the late Kenneth Lay of Enron, Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, and Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco International. In reaction to the “fast and loose” accounting and oversight environment early in this decade that made possible the worst corporate scandals perhaps in American business history, Congress took action to restore investor confidence in the public securities market. It rather quickly enacted the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002. The law is commonly referred to as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, named for the chief, bipartisan sponsors of the bill, Maryland Senator Paul Sarbanes and Ohio Representative Michael G. Oxley. In fact, in an era of divisive politics, Congress was amazingly unified, approving the final law by a vote of 423-3 in the House of Representatives and by a unanimous vote in the Senate. When President George W. Bush signed the bill into law on July 30, 2002, he proclaimed: “The era of low standards and false profits is over. No boardroom in America is above or beyond the law.”