Word: andersens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...accounting and energy regulation to open the door to more than half a dozen congressional probes--and to give some cover to the hundreds of lawmakers from both parties (including 212 of the 248 involved in the hearings) who had taken money from Enron or its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen. By then the White House seemed cocky. For reasons no one can explain, it went through with its plan to make one of Enron's former lobbyists, former Montana Governor Marc Racicot, the new Republican National Committee boss...
...when the first Senate hearing on Enron got under way, it felt less like an inquiry and more like a warm, ritual bath designed to soak away the stain of contributions. Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who got $2,000 from Enron and $11,500 from Arthur Andersen in the past decade, invited former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt, the nation's leading accounting hawk, to do the scrubbing and apply the rinses. That gave Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, who was until recently the subject of a federal probe into his campaign finances, a chance to apologize to Levitt...
...dead - with an Enron ID still in his pocket eight months into retirement - and he'll tell no tales. Meanwhile, congressional hearings-holders, having debuted in unimpressive fashion Thursday with Arthur Andersen auditor David Duncan taking the Fifth in the House and former SEC Arthur Levitt wearily reciting to the Senate what he'd told them two years ago about conflicts of interest in the financial system, took the day off Friday to update TV news channels on the state of the scandal. The subpoenas are in the mail and the show will only get better, but for now lawmakers...
...point. Senate Democrats will have to make the most of their nominal moral advantage of having been out of power until very recently, because the longer the investigations into Enron, Andersen and supposed supervillain Lay go on, the wider the conclusions are likely to spread the guilt. For all the scolding of Enron's accounting, of its retirement plan, of its executive perks and funny habit of not paying much in the way of taxes the past five years, an early glance suggests that congressional investigators will find an awful lot of it to be perfectly legal...
...money that Enron, and particularly Andersen, has been doling out to Washington so generously in the last decade has touched both parties, and if it hasn't yielded much in the way of overt favors, it's netted plenty in the way of what Congress specializes in - inaction. It was Congress that spiked Arthur Levitt's crusade to separate accounting from consulting two years ago, Congress that keeps passing the impenetrable tax laws Ken Lay so deftly danced upon. Congress that leaves accounting and disclosure loopholes big enough for Lay to pay back a billion-dollar loan in stock without...