Abstract: | Let be a separable simple -algebra with finitely many extreme traces. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for an essentially normal element , i.e., is normal ( is the quotient map), having the form for some normal element and We also show that a normal element can be quasi-diagonalized if and only if the Fredholm index for all In the case that is a simple -algebra of real rank zero, with stable rank one and with continuous scale, and has countable rank, we show that a normal element with zero Fredholm index can be written as where is an (increasing) approximate identity for consisting of projections, is a bounded sequence of numbers and with for any given |