Now comes the pain that follows the short cuts

TROXLER E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published March 29, 2002

It fits in perfectly with the tenor of this year so far. AOL Time Warner Inc., that mega-corporation that does a lousy job of everything, is having to take a $54-billion "accounting charge."

Translation: "You know how much we said we were worth, back when AOL and Time Warner merged? Well, we were just joshin'."

Fifty-four billion dollars.

Hey, it's just a little red pencil mark in the annual report. It would be funny, if not for the fact that investors once were asked to believe the company was worth it.

(My second favorite news of the week about AOL Time Warner was that the company ordered all its employees to use AOL's e-mail out of brand-name loyalty. But the service was so unreliable that the company had to reverse the order.)

This is a year for paying the piper for the short-cuts of the past -- corporate America, the Catholic Church, even some of our famous authors and intellectuals.

You put your name on something, you're responsible for it. What a concept.

Tuesday there was a great column in the New York Times by a guy named James O'Toole, talking about all those folks wearing T-shirts that say, "I am Arthur Andersen."

The column said: They lived off the name brand. They made their money off the name brand. They took credit for it, were proud of it, as long as times were good.

But their company, unchecked by any ethic or internal policing, helped Enron to shove its debt into hiding places while Andersen got fatter off Enron fees. Andersen did this and little people continued to be fooled into using their life's savings to buy Enron stock, even while Enron executives dumped their own stock like the rats they were.

That was Arthur Andersen. And I am not saying the other big accounting firms are angels, either -- just lucky.

To say, "No, it was a few bad apples," is to say that an organization as a whole can never be held responsible. As O'Toole wrote, it is "tantamount to admitting that the signature of the firm that appears in corporate annual reports is worthless."

Accountability.

Enron had a hand in writing President Bush's energy policy. You know it, I know it, and the vice president sure as heck knows it. That is why the White House fights to keep it hidden, and the president tries to claim that Kenny baby was a distant stranger. The fact that we are united behind the president in his leadership against terrorism does not mean we have to ignore Enron's hand in the cookie jar back home.

This week, the news came out that UBS PaineWebber fired one of its guys who tried to warn investors about Enron. They fired him, and then they sent out a memo to the investors saying the guy was wrong, and to buy more.

Thank you, PaineWebber.

The purpose of checks and balances in our society, as amazing a concept as this might seem, is to check and balance.

Acquiring a position of trust implies that you should be trustworthy.

In business, that means this: Not making up fake revenues and assets and hiding your debts to try to con people into pumping up the stock price. (Why, oh why, do we have a system that rewards executives for exactly that?)

In accounting, it means you account. In advising investors, it means be independent.

In a church, any church, it means that upon learning one of your own might have committed one of the worst crimes possible, involving a child, that your first instinct not be to try to cover it up with money and reassignments, as in Boston and elsewhere.

In the world of letters, it means this: If you take somebody else's words and ideas, whether it be a specific fact, or an arrangement of the language, a cadence of thought, a sequence -- if you take it from another source and represent it as your own, and have people pay you money for it, then you have stolen.

It is possible, I suppose, that there is a hierarchy of guilt, that truly deliberate theft is a worse crime than mere sloppiness, but what does it say about us if sloppiness is acceptable? It should not be acceptable, ever.

This is a year for bills to come due. Good.

-- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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