Accounting failures have cost Americans $60,000 on average, SEC commissioner says
By Marcy Gordon
ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 14, 2002
WASHINGTON – The string of accounting failures at big companies
in the last year has cost U.S. households nearly $60,000 on
average as some $5 trillion in market value was lost, a member of the Securities
and Exchange Commission said Thursday.
They were "spectacular failures," SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins
noted in a speech, ticking off the high-profile cases of Enron,
WorldCom, Adelphia and Tyco International.
Atkins did not say how the estimated cost to Americans of the accounting scandals
was derived. An aide later said he did not
know the origin of the figures.
The embattled SEC – whose chairman, Harvey Pitt, resigned under
pressure last week – is committed to protecting investors
amid a crisis of public trust, Atkins said.
We are working hard to be more vigorous, more aggressive," he told the Federalist
Society, a conservative lawyers' group.
The White House, meanwhile, said it was pressing forward with its search for a successor to Pitt.
"The president said he wants to move as quickly as possible," spokesman Scott McClellan said.
Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff has been among those
rumored as possible successors, but he signaled strongly
Thursday that he is unlikely to take over the top SEC post.
"Michael Chertoff is happy in the job he currently holds," said his spokesman,
Bryan Sierra. "He looks forward to helping the
president and the attorney general continue fighting the war against terrorism."
The Justice Department's criminal division, headed by Chertoff, has prosecuted a number of major corporate cases this year, and won the conviction of accounting firm Arthur Andersen on obstruction of justice for destroying Enron audit documents.
A report issued last month by the "No More Enrons" coalition, partially
funded by consumer groups and labor unions, said the
orporate scandals have cost Americans more than $200 billion in lost
investment savings, jobs, pension losses and tax revenue.
Atkins, one of three Republican commissioners named by President Bush
along with Pitt and Cynthia Glassman, voted with
them on Oct. 25 to appoint former FBI director William Webster as head of a special
accounting oversight board. The two Democratic commissioners bitterly opposed
Webster's selection. An ensuing flap over Pitt's failure to tell his fellow
commissioners before they voted that Webster had headed the audit committee
of a company now facing fraud accusations led to
Pitt's resignation on Election Day.
Webster resigned as head of the oversight board on Tuesday."
The above is an excerpt from the article
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