WASHINGTON The US. government is considering new penalties to punish corporate chiefs for carelessness in the wake of the Enron Corp. collapse, the ****Wall Street Journal**** said Monday.

"One of the things we are talking about is to move the standard for chief executives from recklessness to negligence, which is an important change," U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was quoted as saying in an interview.

O'Neill did not specifically cite the case of Enron, which filed for bankruptcy on December 2 in the largest corporate failure of U.S. history, it said.

But the paper noted several senior Enron executives had claimed ignorance of the rocky finances at Enron, making it harder to punish them for000cklessly, or actively, misleading shareholders, AFP reported.

Under the new standard suggested by O'Neill, those executives could be open to action for negligence for failing to discover and resolve the financial problems.

Later, O'Neill told CNBC television the Enron case highlighted the need for corporate responsibility.

"I think we can learn some lessons from Enron and one of the lessons we need to learn is that I think we need to be clear with CEOs that along with their responsibilty goes a duty to share information with their shareholders and with their employees," O'Neill said.

There was a need "to firmly place a duty on CEOs to know when they are going to do something that is unusual and for sure report it to the interested parties," he added.

O'Neill said the government sought to avoid triggering a rush of private shareholder lawsuits by raising the obligations of company chiefs.

"We do not want to create a landslide of new lawsuits. But I think we do want to ensure that shareholders and employees can trust that they have everything they are entitled to have from their CEOs," he said.

The treasury secretary, former boss of aluminium giant Alcoa, said in his own private sector experience, he had been clear about the boundaries of propriety.

"I, frankly, did not need the government to tell me what was right and wrong," he added. "I do not think most CEOs do."

He did say, however, that company executives who broke the rules should be punished.

"I think when we have people that intentionally mislead or defraud shareholders or employees then we ought to punish them to the full extent of the law."