NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - It is extremely premature to think that investors have gotten over their fears of more accounting blowups waiting to happen.

True, the market has bounced back after an abysmal July. And many think Aug. 14 has helped restore faith in the market -- that was the day the Securities & Exchange Commission required the CEOs and CFOs of nearly 800 of America's largest companies to certify the accuracy of their financial results.

And on Tuesday, the SEC approved a rule that extended that certification to most public companies. The agency also agreed on new regulations that will speed up filing times for companies' annual and quarterly reports and to force insiders to report purchases or sales of their companies' stock within two business days of the transaction.

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These changes were all called for in Congress' new corporate reform law, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

If CEOs and CFOs were willing to take an oath that their numbers were accurate and submit them in a timely fashion then they must have nothing to hide, the optimists say. And Aug. 14 came and went without any major restatements. Time to sound the all clear, right?

Uh, ever hear of perjury? Swearing to tell the truth is not the same thing as telling the truth. Strap to me a polygraph and I can say with a straight face that I have male supermodel quality looks -- flowing blond hair and deep blue eyes. But take one look at my scowling visage at the top of the page and you'll easily see that's a bald-faced lie.

And the major problem with earnings reports hasn't been when they're filed. The issue is what's in those reports. If the numbers are bogus, it doesn't matter if companies file 35 days after the end of a quarter instead of 45.

After all, there were already laws on the books that strongly discourage the types of accounting shenanigans perpetrated by Enron and WorldCom. It's not as if misstating more than $7 billion in profits or hiding billions of dollars of debt in off balance sheet entities suddenly became a crime. Basically, companies faced with dire business conditions fudged their numbers and simply prolonged the inevitable.

"WorldCom would have gone bankrupt earlier if they were honest," says John C. Thompson, manager of the Thompson Plumb Growth fund. Thompson says that when all is said and done, the meltdown of the telecom industry (which has snared Global Crossing and Qwest as well as scores of smaller startups) could wind up being a bigger scandal than the savings and loans crisis of the early 1990s.

The only thing that can truly bring back investor confidence is the passage of time, not legislation or rule changes by the SEC.

After all, the stain of Enron was starting to fade from the market's conscious earlier this year and many Wall Street observers thought that by the summer, investors would no longer be concerned with corporate governance issues. The problem was that nobody could predict that in June, WorldCom would disclose accounting irregularities that were even more shocking than Enron's.

The problem now is that it is nearly impossible to know for certain when the flow of accounting transgressions will finally grind to a halt. Ron Muhlenkamp, manager of the Muhlenkamp fund, says that periods of fraud following big booms are commonplace. He thinks that it could take another six to nine months for investors to be fully convinced that there truly aren't other big disasters looming.

"I've learned throughout history that 2 to 3 percent of the companies you talk to are dishonest and there's no recourse against that," says Muhlenkamp. "It just takes time to unwind the bubble."

And more disclosures of past improprieties are likely, says Howard Schilit, president of the Center for Financial Research and Analysis. While he's not predicting anything as epic as Enron or WorldCom's collapses, he does think that more companies will have to restate earnings due to accounting irregularities from the late 1990s and early 2000.

Simply put, companies using accounting sleights of hand were rewarded with higher stock prices during the bull market. And that meant fatter paydays for the leaders of those companies.

According to a report released on August 26 by United for a Fair Economy, a watchdog group, and The Institute for Policy Studies, a research outfit, compensation from 1999 to 2001 for the CEOs of 23 companies that are currently under investigation for accounting wrongdoing (including Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and AOL Time Warner, parent of CNN/Money) was 70 percent higher than for CEOs of all the companies tracked in BusinessWeek's annual pay survey.

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Until it becomes painfully clear that all guilty parties (including the analysts and executives of Wall Street investment banks that aided companies that they knew were fraudulent) have been singled out and will be severely punished, investors' continued distrust appears justified.

The indictment of ex-WorldCom CFO Scott Sullivan and former director of general accounting Buford Yates on Wednesday is a step in the right direction. But Schilit thinks that in addition to possible jail times, executives that profited from fraudulent activity should have their ill-begotten gains taken away.

"Under the old world order, senior executives of companies that were most aggressive were the ones that won most often," says Schilit. "We have to be able to convince the senior executives at companies that the world has changed and that under the new rules you are going to consistently lose if you are using accounting tricks."