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Document shredding policy may have been justified

It is common practice for auditors at Arthur Andersen LLP's office in Houston to shred large volumes of extraneous documents after letting them pile up needlessly, according to a partner called to testify in the firm's obstruction of justice trial.

James Hecker, an audit partner at Andersen who never worked on the Enron Corp account, testified Wednesday that he often allowed paperwork to accumulate, sometimes in amounts that would pile 6m high if stacked.

"At some point when I got some breathing room and some time, I'd go through the piles and go through what is relevant and what is not," said Hecker, the third witness to testify in the trial, which began in a Houston federal courtroom this week.

"I'll go through it and throw a lot of it out, and a lot of it you have to shred" because it contains sensitive information about clients, Hecker told Rusty Hardin, Andersen's lead defense attorney.

Hardin has suggested that any mass shredding of Enron-related papers might be mistakenly characterized as illegal when in reality it was routine housecleaning under Andersen's "document retention policy."

Yet to appear is the man considered the government's star witness. David Duncan, once Andersen's chief Enron auditor who already has admitted to criminal obstruction of justice for improperly destroying Enron-related documents, struck a plea deal on April 9.
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