Five former and current members of Enron’s board of directors were put on the firing line last week during a hearing by an investigating subcommittee of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee into their role in the Enron fiasco. Most board members testified that Enron’s upper management kept them pretty much in the dark, and that they didn’t learn the extent of the financial nightmare until it was too late.

But Subcommittee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) produced documents showing that former Arthur Andersen partner David Duncan had informed the board’s audit committee and then-President Jeffrey Skilling of potential accounting problems at Enron as far back as February 1999.

“Obviously, we are on board with all of these [accounting actions], but many push limits and have a high ‘others could have a different view’ risk profile,” Duncan told the audit committee during a meeting in London on Feb. 7, 1999, according to documents released by the Senate subcommittee. Of the at least nine accounting actions discussed at the meeting, Duncan wrote that eight had a high-risk profile and could be subject to “scrutiny of judgment.”

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