J’Accuse ... Exactly Who?

It was that old purveyor of gloom Edgar Allen Poe who used the line, “The nothing of a name.”

A name like Arthur Andersen perhaps? A name is something you can register, sell, trade off of, borrow on, cash in on, emblazon on T-shirts and sully. But extract justice from it?

I’ll grant you that the government’s criminal indictment of Andersen has a certain satisfying, take-that ring to it. But, really, is there much more here than Poe’s nothing?

About Andersen, we can make three guesses: Not everyone who worked in this vast global accounting and consulting firm last fall was crooked. Some were. None of them had a birth certificate saying Arthur Andersen.

So who was responsible for evidence shredding, not to mention the larger crimes that cost millions? Let the hammer fall on them. Let them stand in the dock. Send them to the Big House. Drain their bank accounts for restitution. Real people with real names who did their profession and millions of investors dirty--not the ghost of an old man, once esteemed and now memorialized on a letterhead 55 years after his death.

No, I’m not defending a company with a record like this one’s. Published reports indicate that at least four Andersen clients have been tagged for juiced books, and that was before Enron.

How many strikes do you get in this league, anyway?

But it’s not enough to say the letterhead did it.

Andersen is a web of partnerships. And it’s the partners who benefit from Andersen’s name. Want to bet whether they benefited handsomely over the years?

It would be grossly trite to say that names don’t commit crimes, people do. But I can’t resist.

That’s the trouble with white-collar crime. For too long, we’ve been dismissing wrongdoers with halfhearted fines and allowing them off without admitting guilt so they don’t clog up the courts or get booted off the country club rosters.

Remember, Andersen got caught with its signature over inflated profit statements before. That involved a company called Waste Management Inc. At the time, Andersen executives bargained with the government and got off easy. They paid a fine and signed a promise not to do it again.

Now, finally, matters have gotten so bad that the government has awakened from its stupor, snarling and snapping.

Sure, the indictment is meant as one of those proverbial messages to other free-enterprise corner-cutters, although if you scratch deeply behind the known facts, one unfortunate interpretation of the message is likely to be that businesses with matters to hide should not let their documents pile up too long before shredding.

“The indictment carefully says nothing about what documents were destroyed.” That’s one of the objections that Andersen has made in trying to portray itself as a victim of “a gross abuse of government power.”

No kidding, that’s the company’s official line.

Let me mention events of last October. On the 23rd, The Times carried a story about Enron shares dropping 21% while the “SEC requests information from company on a series of unusual financial deals.”

Three days later, Andersen clerks were said to be lined up at the shredders with trunks of work sheets and memos pertaining to Enron.

Now Andersen lawyers say that since the evidence is missing, how do prosecutors know it was evidence?

Imagine if you were called to serve on the jury and had to listen to arguments like that?

Guilty? You have to feel bad for the mail-room employees, computer technicians and the thousands of others in the Andersen enterprise whose lives are being cast adrift for something they had no hand in. Just more carnage piling up. Yes, this is another of Andersen’s official complaints about the indictment.

But in this instance, the firm has a point.

Most of the people I know are pretty sure that crimes were committed by those who dug this gargantuan rabbit hole in Houston. Evidence shredding is a start. But when it comes to justice, there are people behind these crimes.

We deserve to know who did it. And not incidentally, did what exactly and for how much gain.

Then we can hope to recall a more famous line of Mr. Poe’s: “Nevermore.”