The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, enacted July 30, 2002, was a classic case of a knee-jerk government action that did lots of harm and very little good. The goal was to reform public company accounting rules to avoid future scandals like those that played out at Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, Peregrine Systems and WorldCom. But the practical effect was to kill the initial public offering market in the U.S.