Pitt damages SEC -- again

Harvey Pitt should do President Bush a favor and resign from the Securities and Exchange Commission, but he won't without prodding. The SEC chairman is capable of such arrogance that he may not even recognize the disservice he has done to the administration.
Aides say that President Bush has a history of supporting his appointees long after they've lost any right to expect his loyalty. But in this case, the president's first priority should be toward restoring investor confidence in the stock market, and Pitt is standing in the way of that.
While the president can't remove Pitt from the Securities and Exchange Commission, he can strip him of his chairmanship and can publicly call for him to resign from the SEC. Told that either was going to happen, Pitt might choose to resign.
Pitt has overseen the assemblage of a board that is supposed to oversee accountancy. Such a board became necessary because over the last decade the line between accountants acting as consultants to publicly owned companies and accountants acting as independent auditors of those companies became hopelessly blurred.
His first mistake
At one time, John Biggs, a retirement fund executive who advocated fundamental changes in the way auditors do business, was seen as the mostly like choice to head the oversight board. But Biggs was strongly opposed by the accounting industry, and Pitt's eventual rejection of Biggs was seen as a genuflection toward the industry.
Last week, Pitt presented William Webster, former director of the CIA and the FBI, to head the oversight board. The SEC confirmed Webster, 3-2.
At the time, Pitt knew, but did not inform the other four voting members, that Webster had served on the auditing committee of a now-insolvent Internet company that has been accused of fraud.
What a way to restore investor confidence: Place a guy who couldn't see the foxes loose in his own hen house in charge of a committee that's supposed to make sure that no foxes get into anyone else's hen house.
Pitt has not only damaged the credibility of the oversight effort, he's damaging the credibility of the entire SEC. He must go.