BEAN COUNTER BLUES DON'T FEEL SORRY FOR THE ACCOUNTANTS.

Byline: Joseph Honig Local View

THE history of our republic is replete with stories of charitable Americans taking care of the lame and infirm.

Maybe it's time to add accountants to the list.

For we live in an era when educated men and women - guardians of balance sheets for 17,000 public companies - misplace billions like kids lose their homework.

Stupidity or conspiracy? You be the judge.

They certify screwy statements for house-of-cards con games and stand largely mute as CEOs and CFOs pillage drowning conglomerates.

In the case of giant WorldCom, they may have been pitching pennies or playing gin while expenses totaling $3.8 billion were disguised as revenues.

Or maybe they were just along for the ride.

We are talking about highly paid, lavishly pedigreed professionals who may be doing to our markets what bin Laden's boys have yet to achieve.

Now most working stiffs have lost $20 or $40 in hastily reconciled checking accounts. When it comes to domestic budgets, so many of our friends and neighbors play fantasy league numbers games.

And face it, money sometimes makes ordinary citizens delusional. We expect income and windfalls that never arrive, always spending as if checks are in the mail.

We borrow against uncertain futures, hoping against hope that things will turn around.

We tap retirement and savings accounts with consistent, hazy faith they will be replenished in a month. Or two.

It just never quite works out that way.

The country's wage-earners, though, are not professionals. Which, in the words of scandal-embroiled Martha Stewart, may be a good thing.

I can't keep track of credit card rates let alone million-dollar credit lines.

But Harvard guys with glasses and laptops aren't doing a lot better.

Ask the high-profile bean-counters terminated by accounting giant Arthur Andersen for signing off on Enron's books.

(You could ask Andersen, too, if the company survives. But that is questionable.)

Ask millions of investors crying over billions of losses after plungers lost confidence in shaky numbers.

Just don't try asking the accountants in question. It's too late. They've lawyered up. They've got bigger problems than feeling guilty about some kid's lost college fund.

Should we feel sorry for them? Maybe.

As sorry as we should be when any well-paid citizen succumbs to schemes involving greed and silence.

Sorry they were smart enough to hide the bad news for so long.

The truly frightening part of all this, however, is the question of how many other corporate statements have been cooking while investigators get suddenly busy.

The administration says rest easy; no one's going to take the economy down with mirage profits or phony revenue estimates.

Meanwhile, the Fifth Amendment's popularity has never been higher among business chieftains.

One of the last times this happened, America's commerce czars were charged with making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon's 1972 presidential campaign.

And Nixon's finance chief, Maurice Stans, had been one of America's most expert auditors.

Matter of fact, Stans wrote the book - ``Ethics in Accounting.''