Hey Sally, are my U.S. Chamber of Commerce dues current? Fixing to mail the check you say? Don't!!

A crackdown on corporate crime should go only so far, or so the U.S. Chamber of Commerce seems to think.

The group is challenging the Justice Department's efforts to secure long prison terms for five individuals convicted of conspiracy and fraud in the Enron scandal, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Chamber argues that unless the rules for corporate conduct are better defined, the "increasingly aggressive prosecutions of white-collar crime will inflict incalculable economic and intangible harm on businesses, their employees and their shareholders." It did so through an amicus brief filed in the so-called Nigerian barge case, in which four former Merrill Lynch officials and a former Enron vice president were convicted last fall.

Adding to the swell of corporate resistance to the Sarbanes Oxley rules aimed at stopping accounting fraud, the Chamber's stance represents a feeling in the business community that the government has overreacted to what happened with Enron, WorldCom, and the cascade of corporate malfeasance that has become public in the last few years, observers tell the Journal.

[Overreacted my foot!!]

(The Wall Street Journal online and the Wall Street Journal.)