Enron What Happened

On December of 2001, the nation’s seventh largest corporation valued at almost $70 billion dollars filed for bankruptcy. Illegal and fraudulent accounting procedures would led to the demise of the company. Over 20,000 people lost their jobs, and about $2 billion in pensions and retirement funds disappeared. Despite all this, Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Anthony Fastow profited greatly from Enron. These events resulted in the implementation of new legislation on the accuracy of financial reporting for public companies. The fall of Enron became known as the largest corporate bankruptcy in the United States at the time.

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

This event was unprecedented. The seventh largest company in the United States disintegrated from an annually profitable company in business for over sixteen years to a company claiming to be bankrupt over a period of a few months (O’Leary). Ultimately, fraudulent accounting and misstatements of revenues and debt obligations orchestrated by the CEO, CFO, and other senior managers were to blame. These revelations roiled stakeholder trust in public companies' financial reporting, accounting methodology, and overall transparency. In addition to Enron’s admissions, their accountant and auditor, Arthur Andersen LLP, was determined to have conspired to assist in the inflation of stated profits mainly by not disclosing Enron's money-losing partnerships in the financial statements (PBS). Arthur Andersen eventually surrendered the practices’ CPA licenses in the United States after being found guilty of criminal charges relating to the firm's handling of auditing for Enron

In 2001, Enron, the largest energy company in the U.S., collapsed after a vast creative-accounting scandal. Enron practiced a type of accounting called mark-to-market practice which it used to hide losses. Mark-to-market accounting it not illegal on its own but it was used improperly by Enron. The CFO and CEO of Enron were able to write off any losses to an off-the-book balance sheet and made the company appear financially healthy (Seabury, 2008). Investors lost $74 billion while thousands of employees lost their jobs and

Enron Corporation was an American energy trading company who committed the largest audit fraud alongside Arthur Andersen and filed for one of the largest bankruptcies in history in 2001 after producing false numbers and committing fraud for years (“Enron’s Questionable Transactions” page 93). Enron failed to run an ethical business in multiple aspects. The executives of the company abused their powers by having board members not properly oversee its employees. Enron committed accounting malpractice by producing false financial reports to hide the debt from failed projects and deals. Using a mark-to-market accounting method, Enron would create assets and claim the projected profit for the books immediately even if the company had not made any profit yet. In order to hide its failures, rather than reporting their loss, they would transfer the loss to an off-the-books account, ultimately leading the loss to go unreported. Along with Enron hiding losses and creating false profit for the

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) was established as a result of corporate scandals that led to the passing of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. This paper will explore the circumstances that led to the creation of the PCAOB. I will then go on to discuss the roles and responsibilities of the PCAOB, and suggestions for improvement of the PCAOB auditing process.

Imagine trusting your hard-earned money like your retirement savings to a financial adviser or Certified Public Accountants (CPA) only to lose it all in a fraudulent Ponzi scheme. In today’s world of business many organizations, financial planners and accountants are in the news due to the financial ethical breaches that have affected their customers, employees, and the general public. A CPA has to be responsible for their audits and take any punishments as a result of their mistakes, incompetence or illegal actions. CPAs are expected to have integrity in their work,

SOX established the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) to regulate the audit industry to oversee accounting professionals who provided independent audit reports for publicly traded companies (SEC). Key responsibilities include: registering public accounting firms and establishing audit, quality control, ethics, independence, and other standards relating to public company audits (SEC). Conducting inspections, investigations, and disciplinary proceedings of registered accounting firms, as well as enforcing compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley as a whole (SEC) also falls under PCAOB’s responsibility. SEC penalties have increased considerably in the recent years in addition to increased levels of enforcement activities.

PThe Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) has the authorization and duty to inspect auditing firms to make sure they are in compliance with law, rules, and professional standards in connection with the auditing reports of public companies. Some deficiencies noted by the PCAOB in the inspection reports of Deloitte & Touche LLP, KPMG, BDO LLP, and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP are discussed in the following paper.

The use of special-purpose entities (SPEs) contributed to filing of bankruptcy by Enron, the largest in corporate

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.

This would be led largely by the enormous profitability experienced by swelling corporate entities and multinational conglomerates. And at the height of this period of economic dynamism, it did appear that these corporate entities were leading the charge toward a new national prosperity. Sadly, the decade immediately thereafter would prove much of this unbridled success to be manufactured and much of the profit to be totally false. Faulty accounting practices would be revealed as a most insidious culprit as a mountain of corporate scandals became apparent in the early 2000s. Certainly, none of these accounting scandals was quite as visible as the collapse of Enron and its accounting partner, Arthur Andersen. The events of 2002 would begin the uncovering of a world of malfeasant practices and would demonstrate the need for far greater transparent, oversight and legislative intervention. The discussion here considers the accounting system at Enron and how this produced an environment where fraud, embezzlement and deception were a part of the company culture.

The rise and fall of the high profile businesses such as WorldCom, Parmlat, Tyco, and Enron has been a topic of many debates and researches among the investors, regulators, academics, and government in recent years. Enron was one of the biggest failure in the history of American mercantile capitalism therefore it had an impact on the financial markets because it caused a lot of loss to the insurance companies, banks and some pension funds that had been directly invested in Enron. Failure of this giant corporation made people think about the measures that could

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 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).