The memos include a series of e-mails written by Carl E. Bass, a member of Andersen's Professional Standards Group, who complained that the head of Andersen's Enron audit team had resisted correcting an accounting problem, in part because it would have cut Enron's 1999 earnings by $30 million to $50 million.

The documents released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee illustrate the pressures that can compromise auditing judgments, accounting experts said. They show tensions between Bass's unit and the Enron audit team, whose members worked day by day with Enron executives on accounting issues. Bass was removed from his oversight position last year after a complaint by a senior Enron executive, according to congressional investigators who have interviewed Bass.

Congressional investigators are focusing on Bass's disputes with his Andersen colleagues on the Enron audit team because of their possible relation to the Justice Department's indictment of Andersen on an obstruction-of-justice charge last month. Andersen has denied the charge.

The indictment said that Andersen's Enron audit team "directly contravened the accounting methodology approved by Andersen's own specialists working in its professional standards group."

Bass's Dec. 18, 1999, memo to his superior quotes David B. Duncan -- then the Andersen partner heading the Enron audit team -- as saying it was too late to make the change. "He said the deal had either been signed or was about to be signed and that we could not go back now," Bass wrote. He added: "This is a big item and the team apparently does not want to go back to the client on this."

Bass did not specifically identify which of Enron's complex partnership deals he was referring to, and it is not clear from other memos what ultimately happened. Attorneys for Duncan and Bass did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Douglas Carmichael, an accounting professor at the City University of New York's Baruch College, said Bass's 1999 memo reflects a common problem in accounting. "The right answer is the right answer. It doesn't make any difference why you told the client the wrong thing. No justification is offered [by the Enron audit team] other than they don't want to tell the client they have to take that big a hit" on their earnings, he said.

Carmichael said the disputes between Andersen's PSG accountants and the Enron audit team demonstrate the need to give more authority to technical experts. "There needs to be a path in a firm to permit the technical consultants to take action when they see the firm is doing something wrong" but "that mechanism didn't exist" in Enron's case, he said. But accounting firms also require a culture that permits inside critics to take concerns to top echelons, he added.

Duncan was fired by Andersen in January after disclosures that Andersen employees in Houston shredded documents related to the Enron audit last fall. That was just after federal regulators began an investigation of the energy company's financial collapse.

Andersen's technical standards unit also objected unsuccessfully to Enron's decision last year to combine a group of investment partnerships known as the Raptors so that losses in two of the partnerships could be offset by the stronger credit positions of two others. Andersen's accountants initially supported Enron's Raptors' decision, but reversed their position last September.

The treatment of the Raptors and other accounting efforts had enabled Enron to improperly overstate its earnings by nearly $1 billion for the 15 months ending last Sept. 30, according to a report that a special committee of Enron's board of directors issued in February. Enron restated its earnings last November to reflect accounting errors.

Bass wrote in February 2000 that one of the Enron deals -- apparently one of the Raptor transactions -- appeared to be a contrivance. He wrote that the "whole deal looks like there is no substance."

As the Andersen PSG saw it, transactions to restructure the Raptors transactions had "no apparent purpose other than to achieve a financial reporting objective," according to an Oct. 15, 2001 memo by Duncan and another auditor.

Andersen spokesman Patrick Dorton said Tuesday that "disagreements in any Big Five accounting firm on a complicated audit are very common." The disagreements, he noted, are found on documents that Andersen turned over to Congress and federal authorities in cooperation with inquiries.

Andersen and its accounting industry competitor KPMG, which had been negotiating a merger of their businesses outside the United States, announced that a deal "embracing all of the non-U.S. firms is not achievable." Their effort was undermined when Andersen partners in some countries, including Spain, decided to pursue mergers with other rival firms.

Andersen's overseas partnerships appear intent on joining other firms despite the stated wish of the embattled U.S. firm's new leaders to remain a global business.

The loss of its overseas offices would make it harder for Andersen to compete with the other Big Five accounting firms. That would undercut former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker's plan to reform Andersen and use it to pressure other major firms to change the way they do business.

It would also undercut Volcker's appeal to the Justice Department to reconsider its prosecution of Enron, because Volcker, who weeks ago agreed to head an internal oversight board at Andersen, has said the reform agenda is the main reason he has been trying to save the firm.

-- Peter Behr and David S. Hilzenrath