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A Businessman Who Keeps the Books

For thousands of investors and executives at publicly traded companies, Conrad W. Hewitt may be one of the most important Washington civil servants they’ve never heard of.

The chief accounting guru at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Hewitt stands at the center of numerous burning policy debates — from how far to cut back on corporate reforms imposed after the Enron debacle to which executives are to get punished for manipulating their companies’ numbers.

Hewitt, 70, came to the job last August in the twilight of a long career as a California banking regulator and a partner at Ernst & Young, one of the nation’s four largest accounting firms. “I thought it was a great opportunity to cap my career,” he said.

But the major influence on Hewitt’s thinking may be his service as a board member at 10 companies, many of which spent millions of dollars complying with costly provisions in the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act which imposed financial and governance strictures on businesses and their accountants. One of his associates back then called the process “an exercise in futility.”

WashingtonPost.com:A Businessman Who Keeps the Books