Enron et al would not have been prevented with these programs. The crooks who want to break the law will find a way. Meanwhile everyone else has to pay, and pay, and pay, and the laws don't stop or catch anyone.
The IPO market is the most visible casualty. But it is a drag on businesses of all sizes : there is no extra productivity gained in employing an army of people to go around and check everything ever done. You're paying people to do effectively nothing, just like Keynes' desire to pay one worker to dig a hole, and another to fill it up as way of making the economy work. All these people could be working in productive areas of the economy and increasing wealth for companies and nations as a whole.
The costs of compliance are only so high because practitioners are supposedly scarce. The opportunity costs to industry have been much, much higher than the direct costs, though.
That's why SarbOx is a boogey man: it's huge, it's legal (rather than technical) and That Enron Dude Went To Jail because of it.
The nature of boogey men is never made clear, now is it? From Lenin to Mao to bin Laden, the DoD has its boogey men used to scare Congress into funding more and better toys. SarbOx is a boogey man in exactly the same way.
