Enron Was One Of The Largest Electricity And Natural Gas

Ethics, ethical values, and social responsibility should all work in unison in a corporate business structure. These key traits are better defined as maintaining overall good business morals, obtaining employees who possess personal ethical values, and finally to behave ethically and with sensitivity toward social, cultural, economic and environmental issues. For a business to better ensure these quality business traits a code of ethics should be adopted by the business. In the cases of Bernie Madoff and Enron, the most well-known financial scandals in history, I feel, gave a major hand in pushing business all across America to have and enforce the code of ethics.

Kenneth Lay, former Chairman and CEO, and Jeff Skilling who was also a CEO and COO of Enron, had the major part in Enron when it collapsed and went bankrupt. Because of deregulations Ken Lay enter Enron in 1985 through a merger a vast network of natural gas and pipeline. Later, Enron grew into an energy trading company which was worth $68 billion in 2000. Lays family was poor, which made him ambitious to earn wealth regardless of the path he takes, hence, unethical professionalism at Enron. Enron took advantage of his decision to let gas prices float on the market. Rich Kinde found out about Enron’s oil scandal in 1987 by the misappropriation of

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.

Enron – Enron is partially responsible for the crisis of confidence, because they committed the fraud via the special purpose entities. Because of the three percent rule, Enron was able to put lots of its liabilities onto those off-balance sheet entities. Also, Enron did not have adequate financial statement disclosures. Many of the top employees at Enron were able to “realize” an extraordinary profit within matters of a couple months because of the fraud. Additionally, Enron abused the mark-to-market accounting method for its long-term contracts. All of these fraudulent activities caused Enron’s profits to be overinflated.

Businesses, investors, creditors rely on accounting ethics. The accounting profession requires honesty, consistency with industry standards, and compliance with laws and regulations. The ethics increase the responsibility and integrity of accounting professionals, and public trust. The ethical requirements influence the management behavior and decision-making. The financial scandal of Enron and Arthur Anderson demonstrates the failure of fundamental ethical framework, such as off-balance sheet transactions, misrepresentation of financial statements, inaccurate disclosure, manipulations with earnings, etc. The confronted accounting profession and concern for ethics in businesses forced regulators to revise the conceptual framework of accounting processes.

In my opinion the Enron scandal was one of the worst in American history. While we could argue many facets of the scandal the main talking point in my mind stems from the sheer level of corruption they managed to obtain. Which begs the question how far would the corruption have went had it not been for an insider blowing the whistle? It is estimated that Enron hid approximately 51.2 billion dollars worth of debt. They achieved this by utilizing several ingenious but unethical and illegal methods. However, the key to this scandal was the key involvement by the company which was supposed to be the watchdog. This is one of the major reasons SOX was created by the federal

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.

The Enron Conglomerate was established in 1985 from its command center located in Houston, Texas which is the seventh greatest income earning corporation in the U.S. The first scandal that Enron suffered from was from a merge they made with Valhalla which is a small oil trading corporation centered in New York. A group of traders maxed out its trading limits costing Enron millions of dollars. Kenneth Lay was the CEO of Enron but partnered with Louis Borget. He began manipulating the accounting books which made it seem as if the company was generating profits. However, Borget as well as Mastroeni were the only one who knew what the real figures were. Unbelievably in 1987, Enron’s internal accountant: David Woytek received a phone call from a bank in New York regarding several deposits being made to Mastroeni’s personal account. “When Mastroeni and Borget were being harassed to confess, they seemed to deny it and claimed they were only attempting to shift the profits rather than rob” (Barboza, David 2002). Either way this type of conspiratorial is illegal. Sadly research did not discover the truth to its entirety because auditors were fooled.

Enron was named “America’s Most Innovative Company” by Fortune magazine. They were even successful enough to win it six times in a row. How does a company fall so far that they were the biggest bankruptcies at the time? Enron is known for its risky business tactics that would help keep them afloat in stock sales. Enron was headed by two main people that would go on to underhanded business schemes and charismatic acts that would betray the people who worked for the company. Kenneth Lay, the first CEO and the last as it collapsed, and Jeffery Skilling, the second CEO who was only CEO for about six months. These two people are very notorious white collar criminals. White collar crime is crime that is committed without violence but can have very

The Enron scandal, revealed in October 2001, eventually led to the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation, an American energy company based in Houston, Texas, and the dissolution of Arthur Andersen, which was one of the

Generally, ethics refer to moral principles and values. Random House Webster’s College Dictionary notes that ethics are “the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or governing a particular group, culture, etc.” An individual 's ethics generally define what that individual believes to be right and wrong. Professional ethics are typically expressed by a code of conduct adopted by an organization that represents a profession. Professions adopt such codes to encourage moral conduct among their members.

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 is an energy trading, electric utilities and natural gas formed in 1931. It was merged to Houston’s Natural Gas Company in 1985 by Kenneth Lay. It was the most innovative company for 6 years until it came crashing down in a terrible scandal known as the Enron Scandal which led to the suspension of Arthur Anderson. Enron’s stock price decreased rapidly and abruptly collapsed and filed for bankruptcy.

Enron lead the American energy, commodities, Enron Services was based in Houston, TX. During the turn of the 21st century Enron had an employee base of 20,000 people on payroll. Enron made profits by selling electricity, natural gas, communications, and pulp and paper. Enron’s revenues totaled over $101 billion in 2000. Due to Enron’s earning Fortune named Enron as the America Most Innovative Company. Enron was one of the biggest publicly traded companies and highly trusted by all investors. Enron earnings flourished during the start-up of the computer dotcom era in the 1990s. In November 1999, Enron build and launched EnronOnline site. This was the first ever web-based transaction system allowing buyers and sellers to buy, sell, and trade commodity products around the world. Enron peaked; $6 billion worth of commodities transacted through their EnronOnline website daily. EnronOnline allowed for Enron stocks to transact with participants in world energy markets. On their financial books Enron looked as they were doing extremely well and many investors sought out to buy Enron’s stocks. Enron net worth was about $70 billion, their shares traded for about $90 dollars each. Enron was known on Wall Street as a blue chip stock and was considered to be very stable and trustworthy. Enron was named the fifth largest company by Fortune 500. Enron lead the market in energy production, distribution, and trading.

Most of the world has heard of Enron, the American, mega-energy company that “cooked their books” ( ) and cost their investors billions of dollars in lost earnings and retirement funds. While much of the controversy surrounding the Enron scandal focused on the losses of investors, unethical practices of executives and questionable accounting tactics, there were many others within close proximity to the turmoil. It begs the question- who was really at fault and what has been done to prevent it from happening again?