This is *your* (the collective "your") WHOIS database, and ARIN will administer it per any policy which adopted by the community.
/John
John Curran President and CEO ARIN
P.S. I will note that we fully have the potential to recreate this problem in IPv6 if we're not careful, and establishing some very clear record keeping requirements for IPv6 with both RIRs and ISPs/LIRs is going to be very important if we ever hope to determine the party using a given IPv6 block in just a few short years...
So then the question is, what can we as a community (note that is not ARIN specific) do that makes it more difficult for someone to fraudulently announce number resources they aren't really entitled to? On the reactive side, we could have more people actively searching for such abuse. What can be done on the proactive side to make it more difficult to do it in the first place?