Conflict of Interest in the Professions

How important is conflict of interest to the professions? The answer is complex. Consider what recently happened to PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), the world's largest accounting firm. PWC hired an outside investigator (at the urging of the Securities and Exchange Commission) to determine whether the firm was observing its own conflict-of-interest rules. The investigator reported that more than three-fourths of PWC's partners, including thirty-one of the top fortythree, had not properly sanitized their personal finances....