If you think last week’s sell-off was bad, recall the summer of 2002. Enron had imploded, WorldCom admitted to fabricating billions of dollars in earnings, and prosecutors were swirling around Tyco and Adelphia. From May 24 of that year to July 23, the Dow dropped from 10,104 to 7,702, a plunge of 24%.

That wasn’t a haircut, or a correction. It was a full-blown crisis. The public, and even the White House, demanded action.

In response, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on July 30, 2002. The law forced public companies to spend much more money having their books thoroughly audited, and it increased the penalties for executives who defrauded investors. Since the bill’s passage and implementation, nervous investors who had yanked trillions of dollars from the market have returned.

USA Today: Sarbanes-Oxley law has been a pretty clean sweep

Foley & Lardner’s fifth annual study measuring the financial impact of Sarbanes-Oxley on public companies finds that the cost of audit fees, board compensation, and legal fees continue to rise, despite an overall plateau in compliance costs that companies tend to see following initial implementation of Section 404 financial controls.

The burden of compliance is prompting an increasing number of respondents at the 93 public companies surveyed to consider going private or selling the company. This year, 23% of those answering the survey said they’re considering transactions to take their company private, 16% said selling their company was a possibility, and 14% said they were considering a merger.

esm.com: Sarbanes-Oxley drives away IPOs

The study on investor attitudes toward CEOs and their corporate boards finds almost nine out of ten investors say that jail time should be mandatory for corporate officers and board members convicted of practices harmful to employees, shareholders and the public. Four out of five investors surveyed favor actions by prosecutors to aggressively recover company losses from convicted executives and/or board members’ personal assets.

Yahoo!Finance: Study: Investors Say Sarbanes-Oxley Got It Right; Wish Mandatory Jail Time for Wrongdoers

Millea, a holding company with both life and non-life insurance operations, also announced plans to buy back up to 7 million of its own shares, or 31 billion yen ($253 million) worth. That is equal to about 0.8 percent of its outstanding shares.

Several foreign companies have recently delisted their shares from U.S. exchanges due to the high cost of maintaining a listing and complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a set of tough accounting laws enacted to combat fraud after the Enron scandal.

Yahoo!.com: Japan insurer Millea quits Nasdaq, U.S. accounting

Oxley was in Houston recently to talk to clients of law firm Baker Hostetler, where he now works in an Of Counsel role.

He talked to the Chronicle’s Tom Fowler about SOX’s legacy, the collapse of Arthur Andersen and why bankers may be more to blame for the high cost of going public.

chron.com: Oxley says reforms’ effects overblown

House lawmakers voted 267 to 154 to delay a deadline for companies with less than $75 million in publicly available shares to start complying with the law’s audit rules. The measure was attached to a $21.4 billion spending measure that funds the White House, the SEC and other agencies.

U.S. Representative Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican, proposed the amendment out of concern the audit rules will impose disproportionate expenses on small companies. The vote indicates lawmakers don’t think the changes being implemented by the SEC go far enough in reducing compliance burdens.

bloomberg.com: House Votes to Give Small Companies More Time on Sarbanes-Oxley

The corporate controller of Ulvac Technologies is charged with implementing J-SOX — the Japanese edition of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (sometimes abbreviated as SOX). The process is a “huge deal” at the Methuen, Mass.-based subsidiary of Ulvac Inc. of Japan because the private firm (the parent is public) has never thought much about documenting internal controls or formalizing its audit trail. “Our reporting has been kind of loose in the past, but now we need to document everything,” Sackett says.

CFO.com: CFOs and controllers at U.S. subsidiaries of Japanese firms begin implementing the Japanese version of Sarbanes-Oxley.

CFO.com: SEC: No Help Needed from Congress

But a newly-energized Democratic Congress starting the process of shaping the SEC dialogue around these and a host of other issues to flex their muscles. I’m trying to wake up and enjoy my coffee (jet lag, you know) and I have to click on a Wall Street Journal story titled (Entire) SEC Makes House Call - not the way to start a day:

WASHINGTON — In the latest sign Congress is turning a skeptical eye toward Wall Street, an influential House committee is set to hear testimony from all five commissioners of the Securities and Exchange Commission today — the first time that has happened in at least 10 years.

Yahoo.com: Congress Flexes Its Regulatory Muscles

Members of the House Financial Services Committee will line up Tuesday afternoon to ask Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox and the four other SEC commissioners about the agency’s activities in a range of different areas at an oversight hearing.

“There are enough issues that the SEC is working on that we wanted to have a full, wide-ranging discussion,” said Steve Adamske, a committee spokesman.

Among those issues are the agency’s implementation of accounting rules under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, its oversight of hedge funds, its enforcement policies, private securities litigation and access to proxy ballots.

MarketWatch:SEC commissioners to go before House panel