Enron Revisited as Court Reviews Whistle-Blower Shield
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The U.S. Supreme Court revisited the Enron Corp. collapse as the justices debated whether whistle-blower protections in a 2002 law cover employees of auditors, law firms and other advisers to publicly traded companies.
Hearing arguments today in the case of two former mutual-fund industry workers, the justices tried to sort out a law that represented Congress’s response to the accounting fraud behind Enron’s 2001 failure. The fast-paced session was laced with questions about a hypothetical butler working for the late Kenneth Lay, who was Enron’s chairman, and the role of the company’s accounting firm, Arthur Andersen LLP.