Word: levitts
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...conservative columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the man who was Bill Clinton's chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission use the same sweeping adjective to describe a situation, you know they're talking about something serious. Testifying before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee last week, Arthur Levitt, former head of the SEC, identified the Enron affair with "an emerging crisis of systemic confidence in our markets." Three days earlier, Robert L. Bartley had written in the Journal of the "systemic failure" at the root of the matter, one that touched "Directors suspending their ethical guidelines... Accountants...
These rookies, like Pitt, face a rough season. "There could be other Enron-like situations out there," says Arthur Levitt, the activist former SEC chairman. "Financial legerdemain from seduced audit committees, compromised accountants and inadequate standards could certainly crop up again at other U.S. companies." At the moment, the public's best protection against that sort of surprise is other brave whistle-blowers like Sherron Watkins...
...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, who had pushed unsuccessfully for lawmakers to tighten...
...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...
...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 telling anybody and employ...