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Investors who got a midsummer haircut last week during the Dow’s 735-point drop from 14,000 probably aren’t singing Happy Birthday for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which is 5 years old today. But maybe they should be.

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

While Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance costs decreased overall in 2006, the out-of-pocket costs associated with compliance rose from 2005 to 2006, according to a study planned for release on Thursday.

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

Japanese insurer Millea Holdings Inc. (8766.T) said on Thursday it will voluntarily have its shares delisted from the U.S. Nasdaq market and stop reporting its earnings under U.S. accounting rules to save costs.

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

Critics of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley act say the bill’s post-Enron/WorldCom accounting reforms have made U.S. capital markets less competitive with those overseas. It’s no surprise that one of its authors, former U.S. Rep. Michael Oxley, says that’s hardly the case. Oxley says recent refinements to the section of the act requiring companies to monitor internal financial controls and accounting are improvements, but he doesn’t believe SOX, as it’s commonly known, was crippling U.S. businesses.

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

(Bloomberg) — The U.S. House of Representatives moved toward giving small companies an additional year to adhere to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s accounting rules, which are being revised by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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

This past April, Japanese pitching sensation Daisuke Matsuzaka wowed Red Sox Nation with his “gyroball.” From now until next April, Dave Sackett expects to be equally mesmerized by Japan’s version of the corporate curveball.

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.

Commissioners of the government’s watchdog for Wall Street will face questions about their efforts to protect investors and oversee markets during a House hearing on Tuesday.

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

Two separate oversight bodies responsible for financial reporting and auditing rules under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)–the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board–took steps in late May to streamline and clarify the act’s requirements.

On May 23, the SEC approved new guidelines for interpreting section 404 of SOX, instructing companies to focus their controls on those issues that present the greatest risk of affecting their financial reporting. According to the SEC, those changes will allow companies to eliminate unnecessary controls while tailoring their efforts.

On May 24, the Accounting Oversight Board, which reports to the SEC, approved a new standard for outside auditors that mirrors the SEC guidance approved the day before. The new framework, known as Auditing Standard No. 5, directs these outside firms to take a risk-based approach in determining what aspects of a business must be included in their audits. The new standard must now go to the SEC for final approval.

CRN.com: SOX Appeal

TOPIC: An annual study by Oversight Systems found approximately 75 percent of certified fraud examiners claimed institutional fraud is more common now than five years ago according to an article by Wall Street and Technology. Four out of five survey participants cited the pressure “to do whatever it takes to meet goals” as the most common reason for corporate fraud. July 2007 marks the fifth anniversary of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was passed in 2002 in an effort to prevent and deter accounting scandals, such as those that occurred with Enron and WorldCom.

EXPERTS: ExpertSource can offer several highly qualified experts to comment on this story:

Yahoo.com: Experts Available to Discuss Survey on Corporate Fraud, Sarbanes - Oxley’s Fifth Anniversary

SINGAPORE: Creative Technology, whose music players compete with the Apple iPod, said it planned to end trading of its shares on the Nasdaq Stock Market to cut costs incurred by U.S. financial reporting requirements.

The Singapore-based company plans to file notice to remove the listing of its shares from the U.S. exchange on or around July 23, Creative said. The withdrawal will be effective 10 days after the notice is submitted, it said.

Last month Creative reported its fourth loss in five quarters for the three months to March 31 as sales missed the company’s expectations. U.S. financial reporting costs are set to climb as companies move to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2002 after accounting scandals eroded investor confidence.

Int. Herald Tribune: Creative Technology to leave the Nasdaq