CREDIBILITY GAAP

With the stock market sliding downward despite continuing signs of an improving economy, Wall Street clearly is rephrasing the question of the day. It’s no longer whether there are other Enrons out there, but how many.

The answer, apparently, is quite a few. None may be as blatant about it as the bankrupt energy trader, but the list of companies under fire for cooking the books grows daily and prominent analysts are becoming increasingly blunt: Investors cannot trust the very information intended to create trust.

Tyco International, General Electric, Qwest, Enterasys Networks, PNC Financial, Krispy Kreme – from wireless communications to doughnuts, no industry sector is immune from this plague of anxiety about (and, in some cases, Securities and Exchange Commission investigations into) manipulated financial documents. Revising earnings statements – the polite term for getting caught red-handed and trying to wriggle out of it – is now the nation’s leading growth industry.

While the products and services cover the waterfront of capitalism, all of the companies now furiously revising numbers they recently swore were accurate have one thing in common. Those numbers were produced according to what is called generally accepted accounting practices, or GAAP.

Given the staid image of accountancy, the GAAP certification has long stood for no-nonsense honesty. As the Enron/Arthur Andersen affair revealed, what is generally accepted conduct between the companies being audited and the companies hired to do the auditing may not be at all acceptable in the real world. The methods used to produce deceptive audits are numerous, but the objective is the same – to hide debt from investors.

The generally accepted blame for this is that many accounting firms earn more from the consulting services they offer clients than from accounting, giving the firm a stake in making the client look better than it actually does. To their credit, many accounting firms began separating their auditing from their consulting before the Enron/Andersen scandal broke and others, including Andersen, now are doing the same.

These voluntary reforms are necessary, but they are not enough – the once-high standards of accountancy were degraded voluntarily. Congress and the White House have only

nibbled at the edges of this issue, hoping Enron/Andersen is a fluke, pretending that measures such as restricting the amount of any one stock in a pension fund or 401(k) will ensure the evaporation of hundreds of millions of retirement dollars never happens again, wishing for higher ethical standards in business. Washington cannot legislate ethics, but it must legislate honesty and accuracy in the financial reports of publicly traded companies. At least, that’s the word on the Street.