Enron Research Paper

Enron was an energy trading and communications company located in Houston, Texas. During 1996-2001 Enron was given the name of America’s Most Innovative Company by Fortune magazine as it was the seventh-largest corporation in the US. The problem that led this company to bankruptcy was due to the fact that fraudulent accounting practices took place allowing Enron to overstate their earnings and tuck away their high debt liabilities in order to have a more appealing balance sheet (Forbes.com, 2002). Enron’s accounting team “cooked” the books to every meaning of the word so that their investors would not see anything wrong with the failing organization. This poorly structured company led people to jail time, unemployment, and caused retirement stocks to be dried up. Enron had a social responsibility to its stockholders and rather than being up front and honest about the failing company they hid every financial flaw in order to keep receiving money from its investors. By Enron not keeping a social

On October 16, Enron announced a $638 million loss for the third quarter, and Wall Street reduced the value of stockholders’ equity by $1.2 billion. Enron announced November 8, that it had overstated earnings over the past four years by $586 million and that it was responsible for up to $3 billion in obligations to various partnerships. A $23 billion merger from rival Dynegy was dropped November 28 after lenders downgraded Enron’s debt to junk bond status.

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.

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.

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.

In the early 1990’s financial analysts studying Enron hypothesized that even though Enron was selling some of its major assets, they would begin to experience a great amount of debt. For example, Enron sold assets to a company called Azurix. Azurix was unable to live up to the standards that would financially benefit Enron and over a short amount of time, led to some major debts for Enron. This was happening with a lot of companies that Enron sold to and partnered up with. Over time, Enron started losing a significant amount of money and had to figure a way to quickly make it back.

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.

Enron started to have a dangerous game because of this accounting strategy and after a couple years, Enron fall little by little.

The balance sheet of Enron included a number of current and noncurrent accounts called “Price risk management assets” (Haldeman, 2006), these accounts were the fair value accounts that related to Enron’s assets. “In January 1992 Skilling and Enron persuaded the SEC to allow them to use mark-to-market accounting to value there long term gas contracts and derivatives” (Haldeman, 2006) this gave Enron the “Potential to book future profits on the day the deal was signed” (Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room) and in turn allowed “Enron’s profits to be what ever they said they were” (Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room). An example of the use of these “fair” value accounting methods is Enron’s building of a power plant in India. India could not pay for the energy that Enron produced which led to a loss of 1 billion dollars, however multi-million dollar bonuses were paid to executives based on “imaginary profits” developed from the fair-value accounting approach (Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room). From the evidence above, we can see that the information that was produced from mark-to-market accounting did not allow for the true and fair view of the companies performance.

The accounting scandal committed by Enron is somewhat complex and involves many serious problems, but at a very high level, it stemmed from a few key areas, relating to improper financial reporting and internal and external audit issues.

As competition increased and the economy started to plunge in the early 2000s, Enron struggled to maintain their profit margins. Executives determined that in order to keep their debt ratio low, they would need to transfer debt from their balance sheet. “Reducing hard assets while earning increasing paper profits served to increase Enron’s return on assets (ROA) and reduce its debt-to-total-assets ratio, making the company more attractive to credit rating agencies and investors” (Thomas, 2002). Executives developed Structured Financing and Special Purpose Entities (SPE), which they used to transfer the majority of Enron’s debt to the SPEs. Enron also failed to appropriately disclose information regarding the related party transactions in the notes to the financial statements.Andersen performed audit work for Enron and rendered an unqualified opinion of their financial statements while this activity occurred. The seriousness and amount of misstatement has led some to believe that Andersen must have known what was going on inside Enron, but decided to overlook it. Assets and equities were overstated by over $1.2 billion, which can clearly be considered a material amount (Cunningham & Harris, 2006). These are a few of several practices that spiraled out of control in an effort to meet forecasted quarterly earnings. As competition grew against the energy giant and their

The Enron Scandal was an enormous controversy in 2001. This scandal went on for years until finally the government caught up with what was going on. In the Enron case, the company was stating that they were making profits from assets even though they were not making any money from it. They would also transfer any information to an off-the-books corporation if they were not making as much as they thought that they should be making. All this information would be unreported so that nobody would know that the company was losing money.

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).

Enron was founded in July of 1985. Enron was an electricity and natural gas company which was a fortune 500 company and it was ranked the sixth largest energy company in the world. Enron’s stock went from a peak of $90.75 to $0.67. This was very detrimental to stockholders. Enron’s top executives sold their stock a long time before the stock price fell. A lot of lower level employees could not sell their stock because of deals they made with the company. This later caused a lot of these employees to lose their life savings and everything they had worked for. Enron used a very complex accounting method to trick the stock market. This method was called “mark to market” accounting. Enron used this method of accounting to predict and project their earnings in a long term period. These earnings were projected based on the long term energy contracts Enron was going to make. This could have been money that was not made at that point. This made Enron’s stock price skyrocket at a very fast pace, making a lot of employees and general public invest in the stock. Enron stock seemed to be a very secure and profitable investment which would make people lots of money. The Fortune 500 company went down very quickly. In August of 2001, the CEO of Enron, Jeffrey Skilling resigned. He randomly resigned and a lot of suspicions arose. His resignation was described to be because of personal reasons.

For these reasons, corporate financial accounts do not provide accurate or sufficient information to corporate managers, investors, or regulators. This leads us to recommend that the SEC allow each stock exchange to set the accounting standards for all firms listed on that exchange and to promote the development of industry-specific non-financial accounts to complement the financial accounts (After Enron 53). The most important lesson of the Enron collapse is that every link in the audit chain including: the audit committee and the board, the independent public auditor, the bankers and lawyers that aided and abetted the misrepresentation of Enron’s financial condition, the credit-rating agencies, and the Securities and Exchange Commission failed to deter, detect, and correct the conditions that led to that collapse. Although not a part of the formal audit chain, most of the market specialists in Enron stock and the business press were also late in recognizing Enron’s financial weakness (Corporate Aftershocks 12).