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RAIN 324 Weekly Update: Andersen (7)



Wall Street Journal 3/13/02
Two Andersen Employees Believed Shredding Was Company's Policy
By JONATHAN WEIL
As federal prosecutors threaten possible obstruction-of-justice charges against Arthur Andersen LLP, two of the firm's employees said they believed they were following company policy when they destroyed Enron Corp.-related documents in Houston last fall.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1015972654694804640,00.html


New York Times 3/18/02
Andersen Misread Depths of the Government's Anger
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/18/business/18AUDI.html


Financial Times 3/18/02
Shredding was part of a tidy-up claims Andersen UK
by Michael Peel
Andersen's UK arm claimed on Monday its destruction of Enron-related documents was part of a long-delayed and much-needed tidy-up.
The firm said the working conditions of its Enron audit team in London were so cramped that some people had to stand at their desks.
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT33FNQVYYC


Houston Chronicle 3/20/02
Andersen pleads innocent to shredding documents
By TOM FOWLER
Lawyers for Arthur Andersen saw their plans for a speedy trial go into overdrive today when the embattled accounting firm pleaded not guilty to illegally shredding Enron documents and the judge agreed to move up jury selection for the criminal case by two weeks to May 6.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.hts/front/1302161



Wall Street Journal 3/21/02
Thibaut's Deposition Offers Glimpse Of When Auditors Were on a Tear
By KEN BROWN
Enron Corp. was starting to implode last autumn when the woman who ran the document-shredding operation at Arthur Andersen LLP's Houston office received an odd request.
Andersen's Enron auditors asked her to send over eight trunks to be filled with documents needing to be shredded. Soon after, they asked for six or seven more trunks -- each holding about 100 pounds of paper. Over the next day, the Enron team sent dozens of boxes and trunks filled with nearly two tons of paper, destined for the shredder, according to Sharon L. Thibaut, who ran Andersen's Houston document-shredding room as its supervisor of records.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1016664251520164800,00.html?mod=special_page_enron_hs_1


Reuters 3/22/02
In sea of shredding, Enron records caught notice
By C. Bryson Hull
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Document shredding was a 38-ton-a-year operation at accounting firm
Andersen's Houston office, but even so, the woman in charge knew something was up when some 20 trunks of Enron-related papers were sent to their ruin.
http://in.news.yahoo.com/020322/64/1jft2.html


The Business Journal of Charlotte 3/18/02
Enron scandal shows danger of hasty destruction of documents
Josephine Hicks
The Enron scandal has generated a lot of heat and light on the subject of document
destruction. Images of employees feeding documents into shredders late into the
night, even after the company and its accountants were under investigation, create
sinister overtones to the once mundane and oft-overlooked issues of which
documents should be preserved and which can be destroyed.
The perils of destroying documents now loom large. Once a lawsuit or an investigation is pending or even anticipated, you should not destroy any documents that relate to the dispute. Destruction will create the impression that the documents were damaging or incriminating. Indeed, one of the most common sanctions for document destruction in a lawsuit is an instruction to the jury that it may assume the documents were damaging. That inference may be worse than the documents themselves.
http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/stories/2002/03/18/editorial2.html