Mystery U.S. Accounting

“You can make $2 billion anything your clients want it to be. That’s what an accounting firm does.”

(Satirist Art Buchwald in his International Herald Tribune column, January 2002)

“Managing may be giving way to manipulation. Integrity may be losing out to illusion.”

(Arthur Levitt, then-SEC Chairman, back in 1998)

“The business community now looks at things in terms of what they can get away with — not what is right.”

(Arthur Levitt, former SEC Chairman, February 2002)

“We save lots of stuff that isn’t relevant.”

(Joseph Berardino, Arthur Andersen CEO, January 2002)

“Creative obscurity became commonplace.”

(Newsweek columnist Bob Samuelson, December 2001)

“Emerging economies don’t have a lot of transparency. But where is the transparency in Enron? Where is the transparency in J.P. Morgan?”

(Marc Faber, fund manager, January 2002)

“Like every corporate donor in the United States, Enron was paying protection money.”

(Jon Corzine, U.S. Senator (D-NJ) and former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, February 2002)

“I think that there has to be a serious rethinking in the way we have approached financial reporting and in the way accountants have approached doing their jobs.”

(Harvey Pitt, chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, January 2002)

“Corporate executives are being dragged kicking and screaming into a world of improved disclosure.”

(Michael Young, accounting specialist at Willkie, Farr & Gallagher, January 2002)

“Whatever the growth of the S&P 500 would have been, it will now be a certain number of percentage points less as accountants put back on their green eye shades.”

(Barton Biggs, Morgan Stanley strategist, February 2002)