Posted on 01/12/2002 8:25:23 AM PST by Bad~Rodeo
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- A Senate panel probing energy conglomerate Enron Corp.'s sudden collapse sent a subpoena Friday to Texas Republican Sen. Phil Gramm's wife, Wendy Gramm, panel sources confirmed, while a new contact with a Bush administration official -- by a prominent Democrat -- was disclosed by the Treasury Department.
Wendy Gramm has been a member of Enron's board of directors for eight years and of the crucial Audit and Compliance Committee as the giant company's financial condition was deteriorating.
Her subpoena is among 51 issued by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chaired by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., seeking documents from Enron, the Arthur Andersen LLP accounting firm, and current and former officers, employees and board members of Enron.
Of the 51 subpoenas, 49 went to individuals, one to Enron Corp. and one to the Andersen firm seeking documents as far back as January 1999.
Phil Gramm is the second-largest recipient in the Senate of financial contributions from Enron, receiving $97,350 from the company between 1989 and 2001, according to data provided by The Center for Responsive Politics. The senator receiving the largest contribution from Enron is Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, who received $99,500.
The subpoenas came as government and congressional scrutiny of the collapse intensified.
Friday evening, the Treasury Department disclosed that Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin contacted a department under secretary in early November to suggest he call ratings agencies who were poised to downgrade Enron's credit rating.
A Treasury spokesperson said Rubin, now chairman of the executive committee of a banking conglomerate with hundreds of millions of dollars of exposure to the Enron collapse, Citigroup, called Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Peter Fisher to ask what he thought of Fisher contacting the ratings agencies to encourage them to "worth with" Citibank and other Enron banks.
The spokesperson said Fisher responded negatively, saying he did not think such a call was appropriate and Rubin responded that he thought that was a reasonable position. "Fisher made no such call," the Treasury spokesperson said.
It was Fisher to whom Enron President Lawrence Whalley made six to eight calls in late October and early November, calls a Treasury spokesperson earlier Friday said Fisher took to be suggestions he call Enron's banks.
Then too, the department maintains, Fisher decided not to do anything.
Over Thursday and Friday, it was disclosed that Enron's chairman, Kenneth Lay, contacted top Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Commerce Secretary Don Evans and Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, in October about Enron's financial difficulties.
Secretary of Commerce Evans said Lay sought assistance from the federal government, but Lay said in a statement late Thursday that he only sought to alert top financial leaders that his mammoth firm was having difficulties. O'Neill said he agreed with Evans that nothing was to be done.
President Bush, who has received political and financial support from Enron and Lay in all his political races, said the Enron chief did not contact him.
Several prominent Democrats have attempted to use the various Enron entreaties as evidence of a close association with the Bush administration but no one has accused White House officials of wrongdoing.
When Enron received no outside financial assistance and as the ratings agencies ultimately downgraded its credit standing, the company reported to stockholders that it had $500 million of previously unreported debt. The subsequent selloff of Enron stock was swift and dramatic -- and left many of the company's 21,000 employees with life savings that diminished to near nothing as the stock fell below a dollar a share.
As several employees later told a congressional hearing, they were prohibited from selling their Enron stock from their 401K retirement plans even though top executives sold $1 billion in shares while they still retained their value.
The company sought protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code on Dec. 2.
Arthur Andersen, the company's auditing firm, reported in testimony in December that it told Enron officials that some of their financial transactions might be illegal. Joseph Berardino, Andersen chairman, also testified that Enron withheld financial information from Andersen. He admitted that his firm's accountants may also have made some mistakes.
Then Thursday, Andersen disclosed that a "significant" number of correspondence, electronic files and other data may have been destroyed, some of it after investigations had begun.
Well before the Enron debacle began gathering steam, on Sept. 5, Sen. Gramm announced that he would not seek re-election after serving 18 years in the Senate. During his retirement announcement, Gramm said that he had achieved his goals as a senator and would move on to another career.
Gramm's spokesman, Larry Neal, declined comment on the subpoenas, but said Enron had nothing to do with Gramm's decision not to seek another term.
"He outlined in detail in his retirement announcement his reasons for leaving, and those were his only reasons," Neal said.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee, run by Republican Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., also wants to talk to Wendy Gramm. Tauzin requested the interview with Wendy Gramm by name in a Dec. 10 letter to Enron.
The spectacular financial collapse of Houston-based Enron has drawn broad scrutiny from a host of federal agencies and congressional committees.
On Wednesday, it was revealed that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into the Enron matter.
On Thursday both U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft in Washington and U.S. Attorney Michael T. Shelby in Houston recused themselves from the investigation. Selby's office announced that he and several other attorneys had relatives who were employed by Enron.
Ashcroft received a $25,000 contribution from Enron during his run for re-election to the Senate from Missouri and in an unsuccessful attempt to win the Republican presidential nomination.
The Securities and Exchange Commission also has opened a probe into whether Enron officers were capitalizing on their knowledge of the firm's financial condition when they sold millions of dollars in stock prior to its nosedive.
The agency also wants to determine whether Enron financial claims to investors were misleading and whether Arthur Andersen's audit of those statements was proper.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee led by Tauzin and Ranking Minority Member John Dingell, D-Mich., Friday announced that it was demanding a host of financial records -- including some that Arthur Anderson says were destroyed -- as well as interviews with Enron's financial oversight officials.
That request covers 43 areas of Enron's finances and corporate behavior including all earnings-related documents and memos, details about the finances and discussions related to several outside investment vehicles operated outside the company's normal procedures.
In the Senate, a Commerce Committee subcommittee -- led by North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan -- already has held a hearing on the loss of pension funds when the stock price collapsed. At that hearing, a top Arthur Andersen official said he thought there was a possibility that criminal acts had been committed by the company.
Dorgan plans more hearings into the loss of the retirement funds but so far has been unsuccessful in getting Lay to appear before the committee.
The Senate Government Affairs Committee also announced an investigation on Jan. 2 into the collapse, choosing to focus on whether government agencies failed to detect, or ignored, signs of the impending collapse. The committee plans a hearing on Jan. 24, according to Chairman Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.
The House Government Reform Committee has been slower to formally step into the fray, but its ranking member, California Democrat Henry Waxman, has been vocal about the possibility that Enron used undue influence on administration officials to avoid additional scrutiny of its finances and practices before the collapse. Waxman also has been engaged in a fight with the Bush administration over releasing details of meetings between Enron officials and high-ranking Bush administration officials, when the White House was preparing a national energy policy.
On Jan. 3 the vice president's office provided Waxman with a list of contacts between the vice president or his staff and Enron officials. The letter, from David S. Addington, the vice president's counsel, said that neither the vice president nor his staff had ever discussed Enron's financial status with the company's representatives.
(Mark Benjamin is UPI's chief congressional correspondent, and Nicholas M. Horrock is UPI's chief White House correspondent.)
I would submit there had better be minutes....and not half-assed ones--done sometimes and not other times!
The minute books were the first things our auditing firms asked for.
I find it very hard to believe that an accountant would just start zipping through and destroying his work product on how they performed a client's audit, what they found, questions posed, or asked, data leading to qualifying statements regarding audits, etc.
I have worked with a CPA and it was always his practice to save all the notes, including 'message notes' where a client called with a quesiton or asked the CPA to call him back, etc., even my benign comments regarding what account # was to be used for some piece of equipment or an expense. Granted, this was tax work, but I would certainly think a large firm would be held to the same, if not better, standards.
I asked myself that same question for over 20 years. As the Administrative Services Officer for a BOD, I watched in amazement was the Directors would listen to the oral report of the auditor, agreement by staff and never even open the audit. It wasn't just audits either - there were multiple things that just whizzed right past their heads. My feeling is that most Directors are never apprised of the legal, moral, and personal responsibilities they hold as Directors.
I also think Red Jones has it in for the Gramms!
The Enron experiment was, in essence, about doing away with regulation -- regulation of prices, regulation of financial trading. Most of these regulations had their origin in fear that consumers, workers and investors would be exploited by those whom Theodore Roosevelt called "malefactors of great wealth."Enron used its political clout to create what one of its own executives called a "regulatory black hole" in which it could operate freely. Just last December Sen. Phil Gramm pushed through one-eyed-bearded-man-with-a-limp legislation that essentially exempted Enron (whose board of directors -- and audit committee -- included one Wendy Gramm, his wife,) from the rules that govern other commodity traders. Readers may recall that Sen. Gramm also helped the banking industry block measures to curb money laundering.
What Enron's admirers believed was that experience would demonstrate fears about unregulated markets to be unjustified. Unfortunately, what disappeared into that black hole was not bureaucratic clutter but billions of hard-earned dollars, including those of Enron's own employees. Or maybe it wasn't a black hole, but rather a wormhole, and those billions of dollars emerged in some other universe -- say, overseas bank accounts. For it turns out that malefactors of great wealth do exist, and some of them were running Enron. Seattle Post Intelligencer
Absolutely. Any documents that I gathered that had nothing to do with the audit were either destroyed or returned. Keeping them cause legal problems.
I find it very hard to believe that an accountant would just start zipping through and destroying his work product on how they performed a client's audit, what they found, questions posed, or asked, data leading to qualifying statements regarding audits, etc.
We are advised by our peer review and by our insurance companies to avoid keeping records that are not a required part of the evidence we felt necessary to form our opinion. It used to be that accountants gathered everything they could even if they didn't think they needed it. Then came the lawyers. They subpeona all the records. The accountants get on the stand and the lawyer starts asking questions about some obscure copies of bank statements. The accoutant answers, I never looked at them. The lawyer says What ? You never looked at them and you call yourself an auditor ? The accountant says I didn't think they were necessary to look at to give my opinion. I just got copies of everything. The lawyer says then why did you keep this stuff and why did you make it part of your files if it wasn't important. Jury says accountant is negligent.
I have worked with a CPA and it was always his practice to save all the notes, including 'message notes' where a client called with a quesiton or asked the CPA to call him back, etc., even my benign comments regarding what account # was to be used for some piece of equipment or an expense. Granted, this was tax work, but I would certainly think a large firm would be held to the same, if not better, standards.
Different potential for suit. In one case the suit is coming from the client who is not going to remember what he was told when he gets the penalty notice. The auditor is going to get sued by a third party.
This just reminded me of something that happened to me. A CPA partner of mine did the grunt work to prepare a return. One of his staff people left equipment classified as an expense which it should not have been. After my partner did the basic return I took over from him to finsih it because their were some complex debt relief issues.
A year later I was called to testify about them because I signed the return trusting my partner did his part right. Needless to say I was embarrased in court when the questions went something like, Are major capital purchases ussually taken an expense ? If no, then why did you sign off on a return that had major capital purchases taken an an expense ?
Answer, Um, Uh, Er,
In other words Dane, he's making it up as he goes along. What a sick attitude.
Yes. She taught economics at Texas A&M at the same time as Phil.
She was also Chairman of the FEC under Reagan. She is well qualified to sit on any board.
Then you will know that Arthur Anderson is the MOST aggressive of the big 5, and of all of them are under the most pressure to retain business.
You know how audits go...accounting firms bend over backwards to please their clients.
Fact is, the accounting industry has independence problems, though they won't admit it.
Costly lawyering, muddying or destroying the paper trail, and sheer stupidity, may get the perps off, but that'll just make 'em the OJs of corporate finance.
Quit your whining. It is unbecoming in a big business hating commie.
Bull. An educated worker would have known better. They should take responsibility for themselves and quit whining about bad investments. This isn't a total nanny state yet.
It is my patriotic duty to inform FR of such under these conditions, it is not a chip on my shoulder. 99% of the American population is uninformed over the S&L crisis of the late 1980's, that is very sad because there were terrible injustices perpetrated by our government. It's as if they wanted to destroy the real estate boom of the southwest, the S&L's and the junk bonds all at once. Then the government broke those 2 industries and that 1 market with a string of bad policy, including the fact that they provided the 100% insurance in the first place. After this debacle which allowed GHWB to reverse Reagan's economic recovery, Bush Justice Dept sued 20,000 people who were involved in that S&L stuff unjustly. The Democrats of course had the legislation in 86 that tripped the development market and set the whole thing off and Bush only responded like country club republicans always do. He did what the liberals wanted him to. Reagan was the only good guy in the entire play, but the media successfully blamed it on Reagan afterwards.
I stand up for my people, I live in AZ where damage was worst. On the other hand, if they attacked your state so and then sued so many unjustly, then you'd keep a zip on it?
They loved being on the boards, right.......the elitism of that, right? Remember the old saying, if you can't do the time, don't do the crime -- and that includes IGNORANCE OF THE LAW.
How could I be communist, I've lived in AZ only in adult life, lived in upstate NY and champaign IL as child, I'm not commie, give me a break.
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