It's a pitched battle the likes of which Washington and Wall Street have never seen before. Largely out of the public eye, a morality play is being acted out, and the plot involves power and greed. On one side: Arthur Levitt Jr., chairman of the Securities & Exchange Com-mission, convinced that greed and arrogance have di-verted the accounting profession from its mission of providing sound financial reports for shareholders. To cap his seven years at the SEC's helm, Levitt is deter-mined to halt a wave of auditing failures—breakdowns that have cost investors $88 billion in the past seven years—by ending what he sees as a massive conflict of interest between accountants' duties as auditors and the profits they earn as consultants to the same corporate clients.
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