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SHAME!
This is UTTERLY FALSE. The destruction of Arthur Andersen was a great crime against a venerated and great American accounting firm. They were NOT accused of "cooking the books." One Houston-based partner was intimidated by the heavy-handed prosecutor (Mueller's Andrew Weissmann) into a guilty plea, relative to some questionable advice given to Enron: "Check your shredding policies."
Then the government used the "Partnership" aspect of Andersen to indict the whole firm, knowing full well it was a death sentence (DEATH WITHOUT A TRIAL!), because no firm under indictment for any SEC violation is allowed to engage in public accounting--Andersen's primary business.
Later AA was vindicated ... but it was too late. The jobs and the partnership equity of thousands of good people who had worked there all their lives were destroyed in a flash.
I call SHAME for your IGNORANTLY SLANDERING this great company, which was the VICTIM OF A GREAT CRIME perpetrated by the U.S. Government.
At that time, that was actually good and legal advice, and was not at all "questionable." The point is that all non-final versions of work product do not need to be kept. That would results it tons of useless paper work, for no reason. Today, under the new law that came out of the Enron debacle, it is more important to retain some documents than before, but again not all. major approved, time stamped revisions must be kept, but not works in progress up to the point they receive approval. Monday morning quarterbacking of decisions of in progress work should be avoided by industrial shredding when the final is approved.
The Enron case had prosecutors claiming that ANY destruction of record for any purpose was illegal and actionable. The prosecutors argued that somehow a person should know that someday, somewhere some government action, criminal, civil, or regulatory, might demand to see that document and destroying it is therefore an illegal obstruction of justice even if there is no case pending or contemplated! The US Supreme Court (IIRC) disagreed with their interpretation of the law and slapped them down.
See "Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice", Sydney Powell. 2014.
YOU:SHAME!
This is UTTERLY FALSE. The destruction of Arthur Andersen was a great crime against a venerated and great American accounting firm.
Well, here's the Wikipedia summary on the former company:
In 2002, the firm voluntarily surrendered its licenses to practice as Certified Public Accountants in the United States after being found guilty of criminal charges relating to the firm's auditing of Enron, an energy corporation based in Texas, which filed for bankruptcy in 2001.[1] In 2005, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously reversed Arthur Andersen's conviction due to serious errors in the trial judge's instructions to the jury that convicted the firm.[2]...
On June 15, 2002, Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice for shredding documents related to its audit of Enron, resulting in the Enron scandal. Although the Supreme Court reversed the firm's conviction, the impact of the scandal combined with the findings of criminal complicity ultimately destroyed the firm. Nancy Temple (in the firm's legal department) and David Duncan (lead partner for the Enron account) were cited as the responsible managers in this scandal because they ordered subordinates to shred relevant documents.
...
The indictment also put a spotlight on the firm's faulty audits of other companies, most notably Waste Management, Sunbeam, the Baptist Foundation of Arizona and WorldCom. The subsequent bankruptcy of WorldCom, which quickly surpassed Enron as the biggest bankruptcy in history (and has since been passed by the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and WaMu in the 2008 financial crisis) led to a domino effect of accounting and corporate scandals.
...
On May 31, 2005, in Arthur Andersen LLP v. United States, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously reversed Andersen's conviction because of serious errors in the trial judge's jury instructions.[2] The Supreme Court held that the instructions were too vague to allow a jury to find that obstruction of justice had occurred. The court found that the instructions were worded in such a way that Andersen could have been convicted without any proof that the firm knew it had broken the law or that there had been a link to any official proceeding that prohibited the destruction of documents. The opinion, written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, also expressed skepticism of the government's concept of "corrupt persuasion"—persuading someone to engage in an act with an improper purpose without knowing that the act is unlawful.
Since the ruling vacated Andersen's felony conviction, it theoretically left Andersen free to resume operations. The damage to the Andersen name was so severe, however, that it has not returned as a viable business even on a limited scale. There are over 100 civil suits pending against the firm related to its audits of Enron and other companies.[when?] Even before voluntarily surrendering its right to practice before the SEC, it had many of its state licences revoked. A new verb, "Enron-ed", was coined by John M. Cunningham, the former Arthur Andersen Director in the Seattle Office, to describe the demise of Arthur Andersen.
From a high of 28,000 employees in the US and 85,000 worldwide, the firm is now down to around 200, based primarily in Chicago. Most of their attention is on handling the lawsuits and presiding over the orderly dissolution of the company.
Sorry for my incomplete summary of Arthur Anderson's demise. I agree it's bad form to say that someone (or entity) has been convicted of a crime, even if they have, without noting that it was overturned on appeal, which it was in this case.
Maybe Arthur Anderson was a great accounting firm until this incident brought them down. I have a friend who worked for Enron, he says it was a great company too, and he too might also be right. Ken Lay's conviction was vacated upon his death, too.
There was a very strong scent of prosecutors over-reaching in their attacks on Enron and Anderson.
I suppose though, if I was one of the millions of shareholders who lost money in the Enron bankruptcy, or the bankruptcy of World Com, or the financial troubles of Waste Management, Sunbeam, and the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, due in part to faulty audits by Arthur Anderson, I might not feel the same way.