He served as the 26th chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for 18 months from August 2001 to February 2003, a period that encompassed the September 11 attacks and the Enron scandal.
Pitt was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, the son of a seamstress and of a butcher who worked his way up to become a vice president of the Waldbaum's supermarket chain.
[8] From 1968 to 1978, Pitt served on the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), eventually becoming the agency's youngest general counsel in 1975 at age 30.
"[12][13][9] Pitt was later the chairman of the SEC, serving for 18 months between August 2001 and February 2003 (rather than his full five-year term), as he resigned abruptly in November 2002 during a wave of criticism.
However, he was criticized for requesting that his pay be increased and his job as SEC chairman be elevated to Cabinet rank, for being too slow to react to corporate scandals, for meeting privately with his former clients while they were subjects of SEC investigations, for being too close to the accounting industry, and for reversing his commitment to support highly qualified candidate John H. Biggs to head the new Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.
"[20] Further, Labaton called Pitt the "architect of the new rule requiring executives of large companies to personally certify their financial results.
[22][23] In July 2002, The New York Times wrote: "Democratic and Republican members of Congress joined administration officials today in ridiculing Harvey L. Pitt's request that his pay be increased and his job as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission be elevated to Cabinet rank ... evoking an outpouring of bipartisan scorn.
"[24] Pitt had tried to insert a provision into corporate antifraud legislation that would increase his pay by 21%, and also elevate his status to that of Cabinet level, on a par with the Secretary of State and Attorney General (and above that of the Director of the CIA), at a time when the stock markets had sunk to five-year lows and some congressional leaders were calling for him to resign.
[29][30][31] Journalist Bill Keller opined in The New York Times: "Harvey Pitt ... must be the most politically tone-deaf man to serve in Washington since Earl Butz, who memorably justified junk-food school lunch programs by declaring that ketchup is a vegetable....
[33][34][25] Democrats alleged that he was too close to the accounting industry, and that he subverted efforts to tighten regulation in the wake of the Enron scandal and other cases of corporate malfeasance.
Pitt abruptly resigned from the SEC under pressure after the polls closed on election night, on November 5, 2002, after what The New York Times called "a political firestorm over his selection of the head of a new board overseeing the accounting profession", which led to four investigations of his actions.
"[54] In November 2002 journalist Calvin Trillin wrote a ballad about him, based on Stephen Sondheim's "Demon Barber," that began: "Attend the tale of Harvey Pitt, Who many thought was quite unfit".
At the time of his unexpected death, he was the chief executive officer of the strategic consulting firm that he had founded, Kalorama Partners, LLC.