Best Mild-Mannered Accountant With a Mission

Lynn Turner
Colorado State University College of Business

Comments (0) Thursday, Mar 27 2003

When the sheer ingenuity of the complex financial shenanigans arranged for Enron by no-accountants Arthur Andersen was revealed, the call went out from Washington to Professor Lynn Turner at sleepy old Colorado State University. A seemingly mild-mannered professor of accounting, in a previous life Turner served as chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, making him the go-to guy to help congressional investigators, reporters and suffering investors find the money. His specialties are financial reporting and disclosure by public companies in the U.S. capital markets, as well as related corporate governance matters -- in short, everything Enron and Andersen conspired to manipulate. Turner left the SEC to head up his alma mater's Center for Quality Financial Reporting in August 2001, just four months before Enron declared bankruptcy. Since then, he's been an expert witness and reliable source for not only government hearings, but for all the major news outlets, and he's refreshingly candid in indicting the inadequacy of current accounting practices.