Arthur Andersen

Previously, the profession was self-regulated.

This all came about in response to the Enron accounting scandal in, I think it was 2001, which brought down Arthur Andersen after it was found guilty of crimes in the firm's auditing of Enron.

The Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act is not yet law.

For this to become law it has to first be voted on by the House of Representatives and then it would be sent to the President of the United States who can choose whether or not to sign the bill.

Yeah.

Even with the public accounting, I was with Arthur Anderson when I first started in audit.

And you can get, because there's such large midsides to large companies, you have scope limits.

And so if it's below your scope limit, it's okay.

So the answer to who builds tomorrow's gauges is structural, and the precedent is unflattering.

Financial auditing, where the audited pay the auditor, and we got Enron and Arthur Anderson.

The one design that reliably produces honest instruments is adversarial funding.

A body whose institutional survival depends on finding failures, not on client renewal.

I [laughs] finished my undergrad in accounting, but the same thing happened.

I went to work for Arthur Andersen and-

Oh

... at six months, couldn't do it.

Just stay down here for a couple of weeks.

Um, we'll figure it out." And so I did.

I took some time off from Arthur Andersen and I stayed down there, and I was actually inside of a Caribou Coffee.

I was journaling every morning.

And my handwriting was so terrible on audit worksheets that having a spreadsheet really made me much more productive.

And the type of bringing together the confluence of technology and the things we did were they just played to my strengths and they played to my interests and the way we were able to then push that out so I was at a large public accounting firm I was at Arthur Anderson as an auditor I moved into consulting and it was all targeted at that that small and mid-sized business which again it resonated with me because I got to see the impact of my work And as an auditor, while that's very important work, I was always backward looking.

So melding technology with financial discipline, financial management was a real catalyst.

And I tell you seriously, spreadsheets propelled my entire career.

Mm-hmm.

Um, uh, I've worked for Dell Computer, I worked for consulting companies, b- both Arthur Andersen, and you have to be old to know what that is.

[laughs]

Right.

Okay.

Marvin was the founding partner of Arthur Andersen's office in Oklahoma City.

Okay.

He later became the comptroller of a, a little tiny company called Kerr-McGee.