Quote:
Originally posted by bekibug
I know that AA, being the accounting firm, was not responsible for the decisions of Enron executives. But the way that Enron hid its debt on the statements of its numerous SPEs basically could not have happened without a lot of help covering up on the part of AA. I think both firms should have been equally liable for the losses to Enron employees/investors/customers because of it. It does make me glad that AA lost their clients and accounting license. At least justice got served (somewhat) there.
|
This is a misnomer, in that little in the way of convincing evidence was presented to show that AA violated GAAP in its actual accounting - however, much evidence was shown that Enron's in-house abused these principles to misrepresent to shareholders. The document shredding charges brought them down, in many ways, and unfortunately "it's fishy" is weak.
You may very well harbor ill will toward AA, but in looking at the history of similar cases, the firm received starkly different treatment than many other auditing and accounting firms (as have other recent cases) - that's generally not "justice being served", more like "public paranoia".