Whose side are they on?

A guy questioned the accounting at a publicly held company. It took five years for the SEC to do anything about it, and in the meantime they tried to scare the person lodging the complaints of funky bookkeeping, and the company also made war on its accuser. From the NYT:

Over the course of Mr. (David) Einhorn’s battle with the company and regulators, he discovered that his phone records and those of his wife and his firm had been stolen. Allied later conceded that someone working on its behalf was behind the theft, but said its management did not authorize anyone to seek Mr. Einhorn’s phone records illegally.
While Allied’s scorched-earth response to criticism is creepy, the regulatory reaction to Mr. Einhorn is distressing. According to the book, the S.E.C. did not respond to accounting analyses of Allied he sent the agency in 2002. Instead, early the next year, it began investigating him.

Read the whole thinghere.Pretty amazing, kinda like how Madoff ran his scam so long without detection.