Excerpt: The law, known as Sarbanes-Oxley, was designed to curb various abuses after all the shenanigans surrounding the collapse of companies such as Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. Sarbanes-Oxley seems to have put a clamp on the practice of backdating options -- deciding today, after your company's stock price has soared, that your new option should carry a price that occurred weeks or months ago.