In 2002 Arthur Anderson, then one of the Big 5 accounting firms, was convicted of obstruction of justice for destroying documents partners considered evidence of wrongdoing in their Enron audits. This turned destroying documents into the biggest accounting scandal in history, and nobody wanted to do business with these crooks anymore. Employment at the firm fell from 85,000 then to maybe 200 today, all involved in shutting down whatever fetid remains are left inside their moribund operation.
Wednesday, Rolling Stone reported that for at least twenty years staff at the Securities & Excuses Commission (SEC) routinely destroyed all documents related to all SEC inquiries that did not turn into investigations.
It took a whistle-blower to bring this out in the open. Apparently a 13-year employee named Darcy Flynn first raised questions in early 2010. Nobody else at the agency charged with bringing enforcement actions against people destroying documents saw anything wrong with destroying documents.
In reporting the story on Thursday, the New York Times noted that “it is common for S.E.C. employees to leave the agency for the private sector and then begin representing clients before the agency. Mr. Flynn contends that the practice increases the likelihood that S.E.C. investigators could do undetected favors for former colleagues and their clients by quashing investigations.”
There was no mention of anybody at the commission getting fired.
Your Post is already calling for Washington to waterboard Bloody Mary Schapiro, Chief Obfuscation Office at the SEC over calling off scheduled public hearings on short-selling a couple years ago, claiming that short-sellers had nothing to do with the Financial Apocalypse caused by short-selling. If the torturers can get her to give us the real reason why she cancelled, we could tell you about it.
Now we figure the torturers might as well toss in a few questions about this stuff too.
Clearly, we'd have better enforcement actions if somebody fired the pack of them and let Rolling Stone do it. Maybe The MacDougal Post will have to start calling for that next. God help us, we can't think of anything else to do.
