Enron Corporation : The Enron Scandal Essay

Enron began as a pipeline company in Houston in 1985. It profited by promising to deliver so many cubic feet to a particular utility or business on a particular day at a market price.

Enron, the natural gas provider turned trader of natural gas commodities and in 1994, electric, was once touted as the seventh largest company in America. Kenneth Lay, founder, began changing Enron from just a provider into a financial energy powerhouse. Lay took advantage of the dot-com boom of the late 1990’s by creating Enron Online, an internet trading platform. Internet stocks were valued at astronomical prices and were all the rage on wall street, who accepted the increasing prices as normal (Investopedia). On December 2, 2001 Enron declared chapter 11 bankruptcy, resulting in the loss of twenty thousand jobs and billions of investor and creditor dollars. Enron, once designated as "America 's Most Innovative Company" by Fortune for six years consecutively, enacted massive financial fraud at the fault of its top level executives: Kenneth Lay, Jeffery Skilling, and Andrew Fastow.

The word “fraud” was magnified in the business world around the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002. No one had seen anything like it. Enron, one of the country’s largest energy companies, went bankrupt and took down with it Arthur Andersen, one of the five largest audit and accounting firms in the world. Enron was followed by other accounting scandals such as WorldCom, Tyco, Freddie Mac, and HealthSouth, yet Enron will always be remembered as one of the worst corporate accounting scandals of all time. Enron’s collapse was brought upon by the greed of its corporate hierarchy and how it preyed upon its faithful stockholders and employees who invested so much of their time and money into the company. Enron seemed to portray that the goal of corporate America was to drive up stock prices and get to the peak of the financial mountain by any means necessary. The “Conspiracy of Fools” is a tale of power, crony capitalism, and company greed that lead Enron down the dark road of corporate America.

CEO Kenneth Lay was a very smart man who always thought ahead of the curve. In his search for new opportunities, he started thinking about the deregulation of energy markets, particularly the natural gas market. Then in 1985, Lay eventually founded Enron in Houston, Texas. This was the result of merging two relatively small regional natural gas pipeline companies: Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth.

In the summer of 2001, questions began to arise about the integrity of Houston energy company Enron’s financial statements. In December, they filed for bankruptcy as their fraud came to light and the United States government froze all of their assets and began prosecuting their executives and their external auditing firm Arthur Anderson (Franzel 2014). Enron was not the only company using accounting loopholes to mislead stockholders though; Global Crossing, Tyco, Aldephia, WorldCom, and Waste Management all underwent investigation for similar

Enron was a publicly traded energy company formed in 1985 by Kenneth Lay when Internorth acquired Houston Natural Gas; the company, based in Houston Texas, Enron (originally entitled “EnterOn”, but was later subjected to abbreviation), worked specifically in power, natural gas, and paper and even ventured into various non-energy-based fields as they expanded, including: Internet bandwidth, risk management, and weather derivatives. Several years after the founding of the company, Enron hired a man by the name of Jeffrey Skilling, a former chemical and energy consultant, who, upon promotion, created a team of high-level administrative employees who, by using special purpose entities, lackluster reporting of finances, and unethical accounting practices, hid billions of dollars of debt from unsuccessful arrangements and ventures from stock holders and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Enron executives achieved this scheme by using a controversial accounting method entitled “mark-to-market accounting,” which in essence, assigns value to financial commodities based on their projected market values; mark-to-market accounting is the opposite of cost-based accounting which records the price of a commodity at the purchase price. As a result of this new method, Enron’s worth skyrocketed to over $70 billion at one time, only to collapse miserably several years later—ultimately costing thousands upon thousands of people their jobs, pensions, and retirements. Enron’s employees

In the documentary video, Bethany McLean stated that Enron’s Financial Statements does not makes sense; “the company was producing little cash flow, and debt is rising”. Fraud was present. “The company's lack of accuracy in reporting its financial affairs, followed by financial restatements disclosing billions of dollars of omitted liabilities and losses, contributed to its downfall”(Effects of Enron, 2005). This is dishonesty at its best in accounting world.

The company Enron was formed in 1985 after two natural gas companies, Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth merged together. Kenneth Lay, former chief executive officer of Houston Natural Gas was named CEO of Enron and a year later, Lay was assigned to the chairman of Enron. A few years later, Enron launched a website to allow customers to buy stock for Enron, making it the largest business site in the world. The growth of Enron was rapid; it was even named seventh largest company on the Fortune 500 list; however things began to fall apart in 2001. (News, 2006). In the third quarter of that same year, Enron posted an enormous loss of over $600 million in four years. This is one of the reasons why one of the top executive resigned even though he had only after six months on the job. Their stock prices fell dramatically. Eventually, Enron filed for bankruptcy protection. This caused many investors to lose money they had invested in the company and employees to lose their jobs and their investments, including their retirement funds. The filing of bankruptcy and the resignation of one of the top executives, also led to an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Committee, which proved to be one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history. (News, 2006). All former senior executives stood trial for their illegal practices.

Kenneth Lay created Enron in 1985 as a result of the merger of Houston Natural Gas and Internorth. Within a

Imagine over $60 billion of shareholder value, almost $2.1 billion in pension plans, and initially 5,600 jobs - disappeared (Associated Press, 2006). One would have to wonder how that is possible. These are the consequences the investors and employees of Enron Corporation endured after the Enron scandal started to unravel. This paper will focus on the infamous accounting scandal of Enron Corporation. It will also discuss how the company was able to fool investors by producing misleading financial statements, why they were not caught sooner, and new regulations enacted in response to the scandal.

Even the small profits reported by Enron in 2000 were eventually determined to be only a illusion by court-appointed bankruptcy examiner Neal Batson. Batson’s report reveals that over 95% of the reported profits in these two years were attributed to Enron’s misuse of MTM and other accounting techniques. But while financial analysts could not be expected to know that the company illegally manipulated the earnings, the reported profit margins in 2000 were so low and were declining so steadily that they should have merited ample skepticism from analysts about the company’s profits.

Enron executives and accountants cooked the books and lied about the financial state of the company. They manipulated the earnings and booked revenue that never came in. This was encouraged by Ken Lay as long as the company was making money. Once word got out that they were disclosing this information, their stock plummeted from $90 to $0.26 causing the corporation to file for bankruptcy.

All of the prior represents the business side of the downfall of Enron. That being said, businesses fail all of the time. The reason why Enron Corporation and its executives will always live in infamy is not because the company failed, but how and why the company failed. How, exactly, does a company worth about $70 million collapse in less than a month? It became clear that the company not only had financial problems, but ethical problems that started from the top of the company and trickled down. A key player in these problems was Jeffrey Skilling. He was a man brought to the company by Ken Lay himself. Skilling brought his own accounting concept to the company. It was called mark-to-market accounting. This concept allowed Enron to record potential profits the day a deal was signed. This meant that the company could report whatever they “thought” profits from the deal were going to be and count the number towards actual profits, even if no money actually came in. Mark-to-market accounting granted Enron the power to report major profits to the public, even if they were little or even negative. It became a major way

Enron and Arthur Anderson were both giants in their own industry. Enron, a Texas based company in the energy trading business, was expanding rapidly in both domestic and global markets. Arthur Anderson, LLC. (Anderson), based out of Chicago, was well established as one of the big five accounting firms. But the means by which they achieved this status became questionable and eventually contributed to their demise. Enron used what if often referred to as “creative” accounting methods, this resulted in them posting record breaking earnings. Anderson, who earned substantial audit and consultation fees from Enron, failed to comply with the auditing standards required in their line of work. Investigations and reports have resulted in finger

The story of Enron begins in 1985, with the merger of two pipeline companies, orchestrated by a man named Kenneth L. Lay (1). In its 15 years of existence, Enron expanded its operations to provide products and services in the areas of electricity, natural gas as well as communications (9). Through its diversification, Enron would become known as a corporate America darling (9) and Fortune Magazine’s most innovative company for 5 years in a row (10). They reported extraordinary profits in a short amount of time. For example, in 1998 Enron shares were valued at a little over $20, while in mid-2000, those same shares were valued at just over $90 (10), the all-time high during the company’s existence (9).