"We will invite them, and if they decline the invitation we will subpoena them," Ken Johnson, spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight and investigations subcommittee, said Saturday.

Andersen's chief executive, Joseph Berardino or a designee, such as the company's general counsel, Andrew Pincus is at the top of the list of invitees, Johnson said. Also on the list are Nancy Temple, an Andersen attorney who wrote a memo Nov. 10 telling Andersen employees to preserve documents, and David Duncan, who was Andersen's lead auditor on the Enron account until last week. Andersen fired Duncan for what it said was the improper destruction of documents.

The subcommittee also is considering inviting Michael Odom, another Andersen auditor on the Enron account, Johnson said.

"We just received the invitation and we will respond to the committee in a timely manner," Andersen spokesman Patrick Dorton said.

Temple's Nov. 10 email suggests that Andersen's legal department did not explicitly tell auditors to start preserving documents related to Enron's audit until nearly three weeks after Enron had disclosed that the Securities and Exchange Commission was looking into its finances.

By then, the firm's Houston office had destroyed large numbers of documents related to its audit.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported that Enron Corp. Chairman Kenneth L. Lay held several meetings in late October with a vice president who had urged him to clean up a series of "improprieties," her lawyer said in an interview Saturday.

Lay first met with Sherron S. Watkins, Enron's vice president for corporate development, for half an hour Aug. 22, shortly after she had written him an anonymous letter detailing her fears that the energy company would "implode in a wave of accounting scandals." But Philip Hilder, Watkins lawyer, said "there were also subsequent meetings in October."

At one of them, Lay told Watkins that the Enron board had formed a committee to look into the accounting issues, Hilder said. But he declined to provide further details of the meetings, which have not been reported previously.

By October, the energy company was beginning to implode. On Oct. 16, Enron announced an unexpected charge against earnings of more than $1 billion. On Oct. 22, the SEC began an inquiry. On Oct. 24, Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow took a leave of absence. On Oct. 31, the board announced the formation of the special committee, which hasn't issued any findings.

An Enron spokeswoman said Saturday she had no details about the October meetings between Lay and Watkins.

Hilder also provided a better timeline for how Watkins, 42, discovered and acted on the accounting irregularities, which involved so-called "special-purpose entities," some of which were based in the Cayman Islands, a haven for tax shelters.

An eight-year veteran of Enron, Watkins had spent fewer than two months working for Fastow when, in the course of reviewing which assets could be sold, she "stumbled across" details on the entities, Hilder said.

"The numbers just didn't add up," Hilder said.

He said Watkins didn't confront Fastow. "She felt he knew what was going on and, if she confronted him with it, that would have been the end of her at Enron," the lawyer said.

When Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling resigned on Aug. 14 after only six months on the job, Watkins had her opening. Skilling's abrupt departure for "personal reasons" stunned the company, and chairman Lay scheduled an Aug. 16 meeting at the Hyatt Regency here for all concerned employees. He invited them to submit questions in advance anonymously, if they wished.

Watkins wrote a one-page letter, saying "Skilling's abrupt departure will raise suspicions of accounting improprieties and valuation issues. . . I am incredibly nervous."

The meeting with employees didn't produce the resolution Watkins wanted, Hilder said, so her next step was to call a friend at Andersen, Enron's accounting company. "She went to him as a sounding board," Hilder said. "Here she feels she is hanging out all alone. These deals much have been looked at by the accountants, maybe the lawyers, the top company brass. She had some doubt that maybe she had gotten it wrong."