Word: andersen
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...been put away yet. The daughter of two educators, Watkins grew up in nearby Tomball, where she worked the cash register at the family grocery store and began saving her money. By 1982, she'd picked up two accounting degrees in Austin and quickly found a job with Arthur Andersen. She eventually landed a job with Enron, Houston's red-hot energy trading firm, rising in eight years to vice president for corporate development. Her quick ascent surprised no one, says her husband Rick: "She always had a flair for numbers...
...been trying to hide a mountain of debt, and started a chain reaction of events that brought down the company. Watkins' letters, along with thousands of other documents, are now in the hands of congressional and criminal investigators who are probing how Enron, its pet-rock auditors at Andersen and a host of other supporting actors allowed the country's seventh largest company to suddenly go bankrupt in December. "I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals," Watkins wrote of Enron's financial health. "I have heard one manager-level employee from the principal...
...know now, thanks to Watkins, that Enron hid billions of dollars in debts and operating losses inside private partnerships and dizzyingly complex accounting schemes that were intended to pump up the buzz about the company and support its inflated stock price. We also learned last week that executives at Andersen, the accounting giant that enabled Enron's every move, fretted about the arrangement but saw the chance to double their fees if they just kept their heads down. And now that the party's over and the damage control is in full swing from Houston to Chicago to Washington, just...
...While Senators were making their acts of contrition, Republicans on the House side--with a nervous eye on the coming midterm elections--were trying to score points by publicly flaying some scapegoats. Arthur Andersen auditor David Duncan, who the company says ordered the shredding of Enron documents at the giant accounting firm's Houston office, took the Fifth in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee (but not before briefing the panel's investigators behind closed doors). Then Duncan's superiors appeared before the committee and tried to pin all the blame on Duncan rather than take responsibility...
...stop there. By late last week, it got out a few more iron shields to wedge between the White House and the mess in Texas. On Friday the Administration announced that it had ordered a government-wide review of more than $60 million in federal contracts with Enron and Andersen. Mitch Daniels, Bush's budget director, said the move was "purely a management issue...