When it comes to protecting investors, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has been successful, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox said after the fifth anniversary of the law’s passage.

The sweeping corporate governance legislation was enacted on July 30, 2002, in response to the accounting fraud scandals at Enron, WorldCom, and other companies that cost investors billions of dollars.

According to Cox, who came to the SEC two years after the law was signed, the primary aim of the legislation--better investor protection from fraud--has been attained. Since companies have begun complying with the major provisions of the law, the number of fraud-related securities class-action suits has gone way down, Cox told Renée Montagne, host of National Public Radio’s "Morning Edition" program on Aug. 7.

Also, an unexpected but beneficial side effect of the law has been an increase in company self-reporting, Cox said.

"[W]ith respect to the stock-option backdating … that the SEC is investigating in hundreds of cases, most of what we are busy working on is the result of self-reporting," Cox told Montagne. "That would never have happened prior to 2002."

The five-year-old law does have some detractors. Cox said he is often approached by company representatives who, while praising the newfound confidence of their investors, lament the costs of complying with the law.

Compliance costs are going down, though, Cox said in the NPR interview. In June, the SEC issued new management guidelines to help streamline the financial reporting requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley law. The guidelines, paired with new auditing regulations prepared by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and ratified by the SEC, should bring costs down further, Cox said in an Aug. 2 speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s annual private equity conference.