Chuck Grassley: “there are several antifraud provisions in this conference report. Most of the focus in the media has been on the tax…”

“there are several antifraud provisions in this conference report. Most of the focus in the media has been on the tax benefits of this legislation, but an extremely important aspect of the bill is how it closes giant corporate tax loopholes. This legislation, by closing them, obviously is going to bring revenue into the Federal Treasury that is otherwise just going into the treasuries of corporations. This legislation includes Enron reforms that Members have been pushing for since Enron was exposed 3 years ago. Don't forget, for about 5 or 6 years before that, before the year 2001, Enron was doing their dirty work. But we finally got it exposed in 2001, and we have been taking some corrective action through corporate governance policies already passed by the Congress, and now we are taking action to close the abuse of the Tax Code by Enron-type executives. It is a little ironic that many of those same Senators who have demagogged the Enron scandal are now opposing this bill. They seem to be more interested in something that is not in this bill than the very good public policy of cracking down on fraud that is actually in this bill. I am proud of the fact that many of these antifraud measures in this report stemmed from cases that were investigated and exposed by the very capable staff of the Senate Finance Committee.”