Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I include for the Record an article in the New Yorker entitled ``The Accountants' War,'' and it has many interesting details about the collapse of accounting responsibilities in this country. It says that Enron was forced to reveal that its profits had been off by about 20 percent over 3 years and that as early as 1997 Arthur Andersen had known that Enron was inflating its income, but when Enron declined to correct the numbers, Andersen certified them anyway. Nothing, it has been said, is duller than accounting--until someone is defrauded. And after every modern financial disaster--the stock-market crash of 1929, the bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad in 1970, the savings-and-loan crisis of the eighties, and now the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation--investors have tended to ask the same question: where were the auditors? Arthur Levitt, Jr., who was the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Bill Clinton, believes that in the years leading up to Enron's collapse the auditors were busy organizing themselves into a lobbying force on Capitol Hill--one that has been singularly effective.”