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It was time to find out the real state of the union, so I tracked down my favorite inside source: Ananias Ziegler, a retired lieutenant colonel who serves as media relations director for the Committee That Really Runs America. The conversation naturally started with Enron, and I opined that one can reasonably expect corporate buccaneers to be greedy liars, but the outside auditors, Arthur Andersen LLP, should be held to higher standards.
No, it can't work like that,
Ziegler sighed.
Look at it this way. Who employs the accounting
firm?
Obviously, the corporation, I said.
And what's the corporation?
he asked. It's
really the stockholders, right?
Of course, I agreed. I was going to get in a jab that Republicans say they believe in individual rights, not group rights, unless the group happens to be incorporated, in which case it enjoys an astonishing panoply of rights. But Ziegler continued before I could interrupt.
Now, the auditor is working for the stockholders.
His tone was patronizing. And what better serves their
interest? A glowing report that all is well and profits
are soaring, so that their stock prices keep rising? Or an
honest report that Enron found a way to keep certain
liabilities hidden, which would mean plunging stock
prices?
When he put it that way, the answer was obvious. Any sensible stockholder would want the favorable audit so that his investment would continue to gain in price.
Right,
Ziegler said. Andersen was serving the
stockholders' interest with those rosy reports, so where's
the problem? Sure, potential investors might have been
served by a more honest audit that included those
off-the-book partnership liabilities, but Andersen wasn't
working for them.
But aren't there professional standards, I wondered. Who would ever hire Andersen in the future?
Well, I sure would,
Ziegler said. Consider
that Enron reported profits of $1.785 billion in the five
years from 1996 to 2000. At the normal corporate income
tax rate of 35 percent, it should have paid something like
$625 million in taxes over those years, right?
Sounded about right to me.
But Enron managed to pay only $17 million in those
five years. In four out of five years, it didn't pay any
income taxes at all. Now, I don't know about you, but I'd
like to have some outfit as talented as Andersen working on
my income-tax return.
He had a point. Andersen could be a lot bigger than H&R Block if people figured this out.
Ziegler is a hard fellow to argue with, and it got even harder as we moved on. I asked about Vice-President Dick Cheney's secret sessions with various executives, including Enron's, in formulating a national energy policy last year.
There are some problems with that,
Ziegler
conceded. For one thing, there are a few Congressional
Republicans who aren't partisan hypocrites. They raised
hell about Hillary Clinton's secret health-care task force
meetings in 1993, and now they're raising hell about
Cheney's secret energy task force meetings.
They don't think public policy ought to be formulated
in secret, and they don't care who's doing the formulating,
even if it's virtuous people from their own party. We're
going to do something about them -- philosophical
consistency may be fine as an abstract virtue, but it's
just a nuisance in the real world.
And I had thought they were admirable for their consistency.
That's your problem, Quillen. And besides, what
difference does it make?
What did he mean by that?
Were there any surprises in the energy plan?
Anything you wouldn't have expected from two Texas oilmen
now holding office in Washington?
He had a point there. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, increased energy production from public lands in the Lower 48, sneering at conservation as a moral virtue but not a practical option, promoting trucks and cars and highways instead of more efficient trains, making it easier for power transmission companies to condemn their rights of way -- no, there weren't any surprises.
Right,
Ziegler said. You know and I know that
if Cheney had cloistered himself in one of his favorite
undisclosed locations and had there written a national
energy plan without consulting another soul, it would have
read the same way. So what difference does it make if he
talked to a few people in the process?
But it must matter to somebody, I protested.
Look, it made his campaign contributors happy. They
got to feel involved. They got a seat at the table. And
in a practical political sense, that's very important.
Campaign contributors do expect something for their money.
But as for the national energy policy -- we knew what we
were getting when he was sworn in. Those meetings didn't
matter.
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