As some of you may recall, as part of a settlement with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission last August, General Electric Company brought an end to a 4-year SEC investigation when it agreed to pay a $50 million fine. The $183 billion company admitted to nothing, while at the same time promising to never do it again. See the SEC’s complaint from last August.

“The real tragedy is that the $50 million fine will be paid by the stockholders. We have let the bad guys get away with their shenanigans and have penalized the innocent,” wrote accounting professor J. Edward Ketz in his blog following the SEC’s announcement of the settlement.

Ketz’s thoughts were echoed far and wide and have cast doubts on the early reign of Mary Schapiro, the new SEC chairman whose tenure was only 5 months old when the settlement was announced. At the time, the SEC stated that its investigation of GE was over, but it mysteriously did not say the same about the people involved, whether they are accounting officials from GE or from its auditor, KPMG.

As a veteran reporter, I was curious to discover who exactly the “bad guys” — to use Professor Ketz’s words — might be, and I wondered whether there were really any bad guys at all. If there were, Business Finance hardly had the resources to chase them down. At the same time, it was never my intent to write a story about GE. At least not until I first Googled the name “Phil Ameen” and became transfixed by the universe of information that filled my screen.

“Why would an accountant be so omnipresent?” I wondered, as I clicked through the first 50 Google links leading to different mentions of GE’s former comptroller and top accountant. Twenty-four hours later, after speaking to Ameen by phone, it occurred to me that GE’s former comptroller was a very rare find: an executive who had led a double life both as a mild-mannered accountant for a major American company and as a scion of standards-setting, a role in which he performed feats capable of impacting the financial fortunes of thousands of companies. Now, that’s a story.

While Ameen’s first vocation may have ended with his departure from GE, his second life continues. Unlike so many of his peers who exit the corporate world to live a life apart, Phil Ameen persists in his crusade to reach the land of lingua franca, where there exists only a single set of global standards, and the SEC is no longer the final authority.

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