The Supreme Court just overturned the Arthur Anderson verdict. The impact of this, according to the article, is that investors who lost their life savings in Enron will have to drop their lawsuits against the splintered accounting firm and its partners.
Basically, they are saying that accounting firms regularly destroy documents by the truckloadbefore an investigation and there is no concrete proof that AA is guilty. They say that the lower court should not have admitted that document destruction as evidence. Nevermind that Enron was hiding billions of dollars of debt and Arthur Anderson was responsible for ACCOUNTING for it all. In fact, they are specially licenced to account for it and assure us that everything is as it seems in the financial statements. Nevermind that AA was broken up to deter what everyone in the industry admits: the Big Five accounting firms cook books in exchange for lucrative consulting contracts. You can't pay an accountant extra to ignore your crimes, but you sure can buy a lot of 'advice' from him.
During the appeal, a sympathetic freelance accountant had this to say,
"I myself showed my buddy how to create shadow companies and swindle hard working people, looking forward to retirement. I told him to take a few million here and there, but his gambling took a hold of him. I used my accounting license to help hide the crime. Thankfully, he kept $50 million for me. I shred all of my evidence, but God Damnit! I do that because that's what accountants do, not because I was trying tohide anything! This could have happened to anybody in the industry, and my heart goes out to those brave managers who were stripped of everything, except their billion dollar estates protected under Florida law. "If the Supreme Court continues to be filled with right-wing amoralists (yes, even US liberals are right-wing), it is only because people want a good show. When the verdict against the powerful is always sure to be 'not guilty', it's no wonder the nation spends its time screaming over the fate of the weak. America feels like a big man, telling pregnant women, coma victims, and individuals what is right and wrong. In the meantime, his bosses are screwing his wife and drinking his beer.
