At Andersen, Sad Breakup Of a 'Family'
Laid-Off Workers Are Not Surprised

By Kirstin Downey Grimsley and Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 10, 2002; Page E01

Dana Kearney, 33, was packing up boxes of orange Arthur Andersen T-shirts and souvenir pens in her Vienna office yesterday when Elizabeth Hoban, 27, stepped in. The two Andersen employees hugged, reminiscing about years together on the job.

"It's not so much the job or the building, it's that there's so many good people here," said Hoban, a senior recruiter in the accounting firm's international and diversity recruiting group for four years who was suddenly facing her last official day at Andersen. "It's really sad. It's a tragedy."

Hoban started crying. So did Kearney.

"It's really like a family," said Kearney, who has run the firm's corporate concierge service for four years and offered to leave the firm yesterday. "It's as though your family were getting a divorce."

In the past two days, thousands of Andersen employees around the country, including many in the Washington area, have been told they are losing their jobs, as clients defect and the company shrinks following the Justice Department's indictment of the firm on an obstruction-of-justice charge for destroying Enron Corp. documents while the Houston energy trader was under federal investigation.

Then yesterday, former Andersen partner David B. Duncan pleaded guilty to illegally destroying Enron documents and agreed to cooperate in the Justice Department's case against Andersen.

But Duncan's guilty plea felt removed, even like a nonevent, for most Andersen employees interviewed yesterday; many of them said they didn't know Duncan or had worked on the Enron account. Some said they expected him to make a deal with the Justice Department and were not surprised by his guilty plea.

"To think that someone I never meet could potentially determine the fate of everyone I work with, it's scary," said Leland Kass, 24, who learned yesterday morning that she will be losing her job at the Vienna office. "We're all feeling the effects and none of us have any control over it."

In Atlanta, where 20 percent of the firm's 1,400 employees will soon be unemployed, no one expressed any surprise at Duncan's plea bargain, said Andersen tax partner Lisa Fair, 41. "We can't find the smoking gun the government thinks it has. . . . Now I hope David Duncan tells the truth as he believes it, without regret, vendetta or revenge. . . . I hope he does what I would expect of any Andersen person -- that he does the right thing."

Most Andersen employees were more focused yesterday on their own futures than Duncan's, following the firm's announcement Monday that it had started dismissing 7,000 employees, more than a quarter of its U.S. workforce.

"It's an identity crisis," Fair said of the employees losing their jobs. "They've never been anything but Andersen. Andersen is who they are. It's their definition of themselves."

Some workers reacted to the layoffs with "absolute horror" yesterday, profoundly shocked to be losing jobs they had been so proud of, Fair said.

Others, she said, seemed more "relieved" than sad, because the recent weeks have left them "very weary. They are freed."

"It's like saying the post office is going to close," Kearney said. "You just don't think it will happen."

It's a shocking reversal for many longtime Andersen employees, who have watched recent events unfold with disbelief and shock. At first they thought they could fight back. Just three weeks ago, secretaries walked the halls of Andersen's Vienna office wearing bright orange T-shirts that read, "I Am Arthur Andersen" and waved pompoms at each other to show their support for the firm.

But yesterday employees anxiously passed each other in the hallways, hesitantly asking each other such questions as "Will you be here tomorrow?"

Andersen said the layoffs will be carried out over several months. The initial round at the Vienna office has affected mostly support and marketing employees as well as workers in the audit division, which has lost several large clients, including Freddie Mac.

A secretary distributed an armload of tissue boxes to employees throughout the firm's offices, which are spread out on several floors in a looming red-brick building off Route 7.

In the last two days, laid-off workers have been told to talk to the "outplacement team," a group of human-resources specialists and other members of the support staff who have been given the job of explaining severance packages and helping employees to find other jobs. By next week, some boardrooms are likely to be used for r駸um・writing workshops and seminars on how to interview for a job.

In spite of the layoffs, some partners said they were continuing to do work.

"We're still in the tax business," said Deborah M. Schleicher, a partner in the firm's tax division. "When you're focusing on clients, that tempers any anxiety. Clients come first. I have an obligation to get their work done in a professional manner."