BANGOR – With President Bush poised to speak about business ethics today on Wall Street, Maine Democratic congressional candidates Monday urged the administration to crack down on corporate criminals in the wake of a string of high-profile accounting scandals.

“Today if a kid steals a car, we catch him, return the car and put him in jail,” 2nd Congressional District candidate Michael Michaud said at a news conference in front of U.S. District Court in Bangor. “But to many Americans it appears that a handful of unprincipled corporate officers can steal billions from the life savings of average people and at most get their hand slapped.”

Two hours after the Michaud event in Bangor, U.S. Senate candidate Chellie Pingree held a Portland news conference on corporate responsibility – a hot topic on Capitol Hill this week with the House opening hearings into the accounting practices of telecommunications giant WorldCom.

The U.S. Senate also is debating a bipartisan measure to increase oversight of the accounting industry.

At the Michaud event in Bangor, the East Millinocket Democrat outlined a plan he said would restore trust in the nation’s publicly traded companies.

In the proposal, Michaud called for mandatory prison terms for those who defraud shareholders, and a doubling of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s budget to $876 million to enhance oversight of publicly traded companies.

Michaud’s Republican opponent, Kevin Raye of Perry, said neither party could lay claim to outrage over recent fraud cases involving WorldCom and, before that, Houston-based energy giant Enron, which filed for bankruptcy last year.

“Disgust for unethical corporate leaders who defraud their investors, employees and consumers is shared by virtually all Americans,” said Raye, a former chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe. “Too many hardworking Americans have lost jobs or seen retirement investments evaporate due to despicable practices like insider trading and bogus financial statements.”

In a statement, Raye said he, too, supported punishments including corporate offenders being deprived of their ill-gotten financial gain, the imposition of steep fines, prison time and being required to compensate their victims.

In Portland, Pingree said she wants to apply the same standards nationally as those included in a Maine corporate reporting law she sponsored in the state Legislature in 1998.

Pingree, a North Haven Democrat, faces U.S. Sen. Susan Collins in the November election.

Her proposals include an independent, full-time board to oversee auditing of public companies; a requirement that insiders reveal when they are selling their stocks; stronger penalties for securities and accounting fraud; and closing tax loopholes that allow for overseas tax shelters.

Collins on Monday also weighed in on the issue, saying Enron’s board had many reasons to be concerned about huge risks the company was incurring but ignored them.

“Ultimately, the board’s failure to act on the many warning signs detailed in our report was borne by the shareholders and workers of Enron,” said Collins, the ranking minority member of the subcommittee that released a report Monday on Enron’s collapse.

As Democrats sought to gain advantage from an issue that threatens political harm to the Republican administration, Pingree’s GOP opponent released names of prominent Democrats who support her candidacy.

Collins said Scott Hutchinson, Anne Pringle, Ed Kane and Linda Abromson will be co-chairs of “Democrats for Collins.”

Hutchinson has served as campaign treasurer for former Democratic Sens. George Mitchell and Edmund Muskie and former Gov. Kenneth Curtis. Pringle and Abromson are former Portland mayors. Kane served eight years in the Legislature as a Democrat.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.