Posted on 03/14/2002 12:12:00 PM PST by TLBSHOW
Arthur Andersen indicted for obstruction of justice in Enron scandal
NOTHING FOLLOWS YET
Perhaps just in time.
Perhaps not...
I don't know for sure, but I think their world wide business smokes their US business. In fact, either Andersen or another "big 5" firm is the largest law firm in the world. Not in the US, mind you, since the ABA won't let law firms share profits with non lawyers. While I disagree with that position, the Enron mess sure doesn't help my argument much.
I hate the Clintons as much as anyone--and more than most. However: 1) You have to go a piece yet to prove complicity in ANYTHING regarding the Clintons and Enron. Yes, there's smoke--but not yet a fire. 2) These 85,000 will be employed in 3 weeks, with Deloitte & Touche, McGladrey, Pullen, and others. Only about 6 dozen partners will be left, with a hell of a lot of furniture in empty offices.
Wonder which bank has the unsecured line of credit out there for (maybe) $1Bill???
Nice idea but impractical in real life. Accounting firms shred massive amounts of paper every day. For example, at the small CPA firm where I used to work, each employee had a shred box that was periodically emptied by the office runner and shredded. If while making a spreadsheet workpaper I noticed a mistake after printing, I'd print out a corrected version and put the incorrect one in the shred box. If a photocopy came out wrong, the messed up one would go into the shred box. If I realized that a spreadsheet was not designed right or not doing what I wanted to do, it would go into the shred box. If I had too many copies of a paper, the unneeded extra copies would go into the shred box. Tax returns were always generating incorrect forms that needed to be shredded. So there was constant shredding every day of ordinary documents. Now, if a workpaper was corrected or changed by a reviewer, then the older copy would be kept in the file with a big S scrawled on it for superseded behind the corrected version. But, generally, vast amounts of paper with potentially sensitive information are shredded every day in accounting firms. There isn't enough space to store it all nor do you want such info thrown out where an outsider could go through it at a dump. Shredding and burning was the safe thing to do.
Also, employees committing fraud would be aware of the web cameras. They would clearly try to dispose of the documents out of the view of the cameras.
Plus, the cameras and storage of their films would take up a lot of memory space. That equals dollars which means even higher fees for auditing or lower profits for the accountants (which in turn means that that only the least able and most desparate people would be recruited for the job -- possibly creating an even worse potential for fraud).
Finally, web cameras would go beyond the normal employee privacy concerns about internal security cameras. At least those cameras are only viewed by internal security people, not some wierdo halfway around the world (or a competitor).
Attorney's can take advantage of attorney-client privilege to protect them when they give such illegal advice. Their conversations can't be used in a court of law. Accountants, however, rarely have that protection (though I do recall some lobbying in some states to create a similar protection for accountants -- I don't know if they've yet succeeded). That's one reason why some CPA's become attorneys, to gain that extra level of protection.
Accountants who give clients illegal advice take a great risk if they are the one's who sign a tax return. The illegal details would need to be reasonably hidden to keep the tax preparer from trouble. That's one reason why tax preparers giving illegal advice often do the return for cash and don't sign it to minimize their risk. Of course, anyone using such an accountant is very aware that they're doing something illegal and deserves to get burned.
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