Ethics Of Enron : A Corporate Disaster

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

sprees, wild corporate “gatherings” became the norm. Employees who could not afford the lavish lifestyle created at Enron began to take a toll on them. Trying to keep up with the crowd, lower level employees found themselves maxing out their credit cards and putting themselves in debt. This created an environment that seemed to worry less about earning actual profits. According to Li (2010), shareholders and employees were told by Enron’s CEO the stock would probably rise but did not disclose he was selling his stock while telling everyone else to buy. Shareholders were completely unaware of the irregularities going on at Enron and were constantly lied to about the company’s actual health. Actually, employees were never told by any of Enron’s top management team, the true status of the company. Li (2010) stated not only until the investigation surrounding Enron’s bankruptcy enabled shareholders to learn of the CEO stock sell-off before February 14, 2002 which is when the sell-off would otherwise have been disclosed. However, the most damaging act was committed by the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. According to Li (2010), their reputation was damaged by their admission on January 10, 2002 that employees of the firm had destroyed documents and correspondence related to the Enron engagement. The shredding of documents was a clear admission of guilt which eventually caused Arthur Anderson to also file for bankruptcy. Auditor’s reputation is based on being reliable, honest, and

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 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

The story of Enron is truly remarkable. As a company it merely controlled the electricity, natural gas and communications sectors of the world. It reported (key word, reported) revenues over one hundred billion US dollars and was presented America’s Most Innovative Company by Fortune magazine for six sequential years. But, with power comes greed and Enron from its inception employed people who set their eyes upon money, prestige, power or a combination of the three. The gluttony took over sectors which the company could not operate proficiently nor successfully.

In October of 2001, Enron announced a third-quarter loss of $618 million. The SEC and the U.S. Department of Justice both launched investigations into the sudden fall of the company and found that Enron had overstated their earnings by an estimated $586 million since 1997. Top executives in the company sold their majority shares days before the company’s collapse leaving lower level employees with worthless stocks in their pensions causing them to lose the majority of their life savings (CNN). As of today, charges have been brought against at least sixteen employees and executives in connection with Enron on counts of wire fraud, securities fraud, insider trading and money laundering among others. Flashback to June 17, 1972, and the

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.

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

Enron's entire scandal was based on a foundation of lies characterized by the most brazen and most unethical accounting and business practices that will forever have a place in the hall of scandals that have shamed American history. To the outside, Enron looked like a well run, innovative company. This was largely a result of self-created businesses or ventures that were made "off the balance sheet." These side businesses would sell stock, reporting profits, but not reporting losses. "Treating these businesses "off the balance sheet" meant that Enron pretended that these businesses were autonomous, separate firms. But, if the new business made money, Enron would report it as income. If the new business lost money or borrowed money, the losses and debt were not reported by Enron" (mgmtguru.com). As the Management Guru website explains, these tactics were alls designed to make Enron look like a more profitable company and to give it a higher stock price.

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).

Most of the top executives overstated Enron’s earnings by several million dollars (Niskanen, 2005) causing the company’s stockholders to lose millions of dollars. Kenneth Lay who joined InterNorth, later renamed Enron, in 1985 became the CEO the following year. In 1990, Kenneth Lay hired Jeff Skilling to work in the operations department. Jeff Skilling would eventually take over Enron in 2001 as there Chief Executive Officer, replacing Kenneth Lay (Zimmerli, Richter, & Holzinger, 2007, p. 131).

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.

The key factors or critical issues presented in the case are the downfalls of Enron, which originated out of Houston Texas by Han, Henry(n.d.). He was one of the highest paid Chief Executive Officers in 1999. This organization was aware of the first gas pipeline company that implied known worldwide. The company covers the world’s leading electricity innovations, personnel management, and risk management processes. Also, further studies the company 's dramatic failed complex issues that the forced company to file bankruptcy. These items consisted of its trading strategies became under attack or questionable by others within the business sector. Their methods of financial reporting problems (showed the company as attaining, loses, however, the owners and other factors of the organization showed an excessive amount of profit and growth), and governance breakdowns inside and outside the organization. The case offers students a prospect to explore the rise and fall of Enron and to understand the systemic issues in management that affected its board of directors, the audit committee, the external auditors, and financial analysts. Therefore, this was the beginning of the end at Enron: Jeff Skilling publicly announced he was quitting as Chief Financial Officer. "For many of those working within the organization, this is when the downfall and it became (Skilling Takes a Hike (2001) evident. The CEO and CFO or Enron 's regarded as the villain my personal perception are that they

Enron fires 20,000 employees and billions of investors’ money is gone almost overnight. Enron, an American energy, commodities and services company based out of Houston, Texas files for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001. Founded in 1985, Enron merged with Houston’s Natural Gas and InterNorth, which all were relatively regional companies in the United States (Forbes, 2013). They purchased large quantities of natural gas at a discounted rate then distributed it though its own pipeline system to wholesale customers like power companies (Forbes, 2013). Because of their witty business decisions, Enron helped transform the natural gas market and all the while, capturing huge profits for themselves. Over time, Enron had inflated its earnings by hiding debts and losses in subsidiary partnerships like energy trading, power generation, water, and retail electricity.

In October, 2001, Arthur Andersen, the supervisor of the Enron account, found himself in deep hot water with the Enron Oil Company in Texas, as the SEC announced that an investigation into the accounting of Enron was pending (Ferrell, Fraedrich, Ferrell, 2011). On November 8, 2001, Enron was forced to present its financial statements of five years to which Andersen was the auditor (Ferrell, 2011). About five hundred and eighty-six million dollars in losses were ascertained and therefore, Enron, was forced into bankruptcy one month afterwards (Ferrell, 2011). By December 2001 Enron filed bankruptcy (Ferrell, 2011). This event triggered a domino effect and as Enron’s accountant, Andersen was charged for obstruction of justice.