Throw the bums in jail

SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt said he was "mad as hell" last week in the wake of WorldCom's (WCOME, news, msgs) stunning admission that it hid $3.8 billion in expenses to inflate its reported profit. Well, so am I, and so are plenty of other people I know. It's time for some accountability -- which means some prison sentences for high-level corporate wrongdoers.

Before I return to the subject of retribution, let's review the investment perspective for a moment.

I hope no one is even thinking of buying WorldCom stock at six cents, or wherever it's trading on the increasingly rare occasions it does trade. As I wrote in this column on April 23, "readers of this column have been amply warned about WorldCom, a company I have distrusted for some time." I recommended selling when the stock sank below $5 a share. The only kind thing I had to say was that "WorldCom, you might argue, is still earning a profit." That, of course, we now know to be a blatant falsehood. Former Chief Executive Bernard Ebbers is gone -- good riddance -- but Bert Roberts inexplicably remains as chairman. In my view, WorldCom deserves the bankruptcy filing that seems all but inevitable, and its top executives deserve far worse. I'm sorry for the many thousands of innocent investors (including me) who lost money in this stock.

By the way, if you felt sorry for Arthur Andersen after its recent conviction for obstruction of justice in the Enron (ENRNQ, news, msgs) case, then perhaps you believe its recent protests that it knew nothing of WorldCom's egregious accounting fraud, even though it audited that company's books, too. Top Andersen executives still have plenty of explaining to do, perhaps in court.