They say that hindsight is 20/20. And as we look back on the Pension Protection Act, which was passed just over 15 years ago, it’s clear that our understanding of the law has, well, cleared up.

Commendably, this legislation was crafted with the best of intentions — to help more Americans save for retirement — but its unintended consequences made a greater impact for too long.

Among other provisions, the Pension Protection Act gave plan sponsors the power to automatically enroll employees in their 401(k) plans. But high workforce mobility, coupled with a lack of seamless plan-to-plan asset portability solutions for job-changing participants, led to an unintended consequence: a sharp uptick in small, stranded 401(k) savings accounts.

Two data points illustrate the enormity of the problem inadvertently created by auto enrollment. First, at year-end 2015, 41.3% of plan participants in the Employee Benefit Research Institute/Investment Company Institute 401(k) database had 401(k) savings account balances of under $10,000. This was the highest percentage of participants in the database with 401(k) account balances below $10,000 since year-end 2008.

And second, the number of active participant accounts with under $15,000 rose from 23.5 million in 2005 to 31.6 million in 2015, according to the EBRI/ICI database and U.S. Department of Labor’s Private Pension database. This jump of 34.5% represents, on average, an increase of 735,841 small 401(k) accounts per year during that decade.

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