Posted on: Friday, January 24, 2003

Bush ignoring promise of corporate reforms

After unseemly hesitation in the wake of last year's Enron and WorldCom scandals, President Bush finally backed bipartisan reform legislation in Congress.

But then, in October, the accounting industry lobbyist who headed the Securities and Exchange Commission, Harvey Pitt, appointed the spectacularly unqualified William Webster to chair the new accounting oversight board created by the reform bill.

Soon both Pitt and Webster, thankfully, had resigned. To succeed Pitt, Bush nominated William Donaldson, former head of the New York Stock Exchange: not exactly our idea of a reformer, but surely a man of great experience, judgment and probity. So, despite an appallingly bad start, corporate oversight was back on track, right?

Wrong. Bush has yet to submit Donaldson's nomination to the Senate. That leaves the disgraced Pitt still in charge, a lame duck chairing key meetings on writing the rules for accounting reforms.

The continuing perversion of corporate oversight reform is no accident.