Failure And Fraud Of Enron

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 this incident, the chairman of one of India’s largest technology company, Ramalingam Raju, the person who has sought to use technology to improve life in rural India said that he concocted important financial results, including a cash balance of more than 1 billion dollars. Analysts in India have termed the Satyam scandal India's own Enron scandal. Some social commentators see it more as a part of a broader problem relating to India's caste-based, family-owned corporate environment. This Scandal is obviously a major blow to the reputation of the IT outsourcing industry in India, and reveals some of the challenges of due diligence in such relationships.

The Enron scandal has far-reaching political and financial implications. In just 15 years, Enron grew from nowhere to be America's seventh largest company, employing 21,000 staff in more than 40 countries. But the firm's success turned out to have involved an elaborate scam. Enron lied about its profits and stands accused of a range of shady dealings, including concealing debts so they didn't show up in the company's accounts. As the depth of the deception unfolded, investors and creditors retreated, forcing the firm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December. More than six months after a criminal inquiry was announced, the guilty parties have still not been brought to justice.

The tale of Enron presents a unique perspective on success. In the short span of 24 months, Enron transformed from being the top firm in its industry to one that filed for bankruptcy. The reflection about how the tides changed in such a short period uncovers many surprising truths. In its glory days Enron beamed billion dollar profits each quarter, however this success was all a part of an elaborate scheme. Behind the veil of smoke and mirrors was a series of deceptive and unethical accounting practices. For Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay it was always about outward perception and to them this revolved around the stock price. If the stock price kept rising, as far as they were concerned Enron was doing just fine. The case of Enron is the

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 particular causes of Enron 's failure are complex. There are lots of issues that have to do with the Enron collapse. Enron is a company that was called as Houston Natural Gas and then Enteron. It becomes politically connected player in the new deregulated market of energy. At one time Enron appears to have been a successful and innovative enterprise, principally engaged in trading and dealing in energy-related contracts. At some point it expanded by making substantial investments in a variety of large-scale projects. Although some of these were initially successful, others resulted in Enron incurring large economic losses. Then it appears to have embarked on covering up losses and manufacturing earnings. This succeeded for a time, but

The Enron Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay knew was one they kept to themselves and a few chosen colleagues. The rest of the world saw a global oil company on the cutting edge of its business and paving a path that other American firms could follow. In its trail, investors were getting rich, employees found reward and satisfaction, and the community it called home thought it to be a model citizen and stalwart of its corporate skyline. But the truth was that the Enron Skilling and Lay knew was a fragile combination of slippery investments, shoddy book keeping, disrespect for the law, a lack of personal integrity and accountability, false communications to the public, and poor ethical management. All this was concealed by a leadership culture that seemed to believe they were either too smart to get caught or too important to be questioned. Enron and its executives paved a path that took them from a small oil company to a global leader to bankruptcy court and now many of its former executives sit in federal prison cells 13 years after the company’s tumultuous downfall. The lessons of the self-inflicted largesse from Enron are many but the one that glares from its core is that honesty and integrity need to hold a firm place at the center of a company’s business philosophies or it may quickly find a rocky path to its own end.

One of the biggest corporate financial frauds in history was Enron scandal, where the relationship between the company governance and their auditors - Arthur Andersen was one of the factors that helped the company hide its frauds, which eventually led Enron’s bankruptcy. The accounting firm was accused of not acting independently and misstating Enron 's accounts such as keeping huge debts off balance sheets. Some believe that the auditors had gone along with Enron’s questionable accounting practices in order to maintain their work. As a result, the shareholders lost $74 billion further (further depressing the stock market), thousands of employees and investors lost their retirement accounts, and many employees lost their jobs. In addition,

Enron’s overall business practices are not ethical. One business practice of Enron that I think poses an ethical issue is their attitude towards its employees. They create a highly competitive and a result oriented business atmosphere. They used a system where they would rank employees every half a year and fire employees who ranked on the bottom 1/5 of the scores. This kind of attitude where only results matter and if you don’t produce anything good you will get fired will only hurt the company. This promotes unethical behavior and getting what needs to be done to get good results no matter what and if you do well you will receive big bonuses. This approach towards Enron’s employees did not have very good utilitarian reasoning. This

Enron Corporation, an oil later turned energy company, was founded in 1985. It quickly rose to the top, even being named Forbes Top Fortune 500 Company 6 years in a row. Despite small hiccups in its history, it pushed on, which some would account to its executives such as Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skillings, and more. In 2000, its stock was rising by three to four hundred percent. Suddenly, Enron declared bankruptcy in December of 2001, which shocked people everywhere. Accounting fraud and unethical business ethics committed by the company were surfacing and thousands of people were losing their jobs and benefits. The route of Enron’s downfall was not the fraud, but the lack of moral compass within the founders and executives of the company. By having the ability to push aside the guilt of hurting thousands of people, these men single-handedly ran this company into the ground.

The perfect fraud storm occurred between the years 2000 and 2002 involving two of the largest energy and telecom corporations in the United States: Enron and WorldCom. It was determined that both organizations fraudulently overstated assets, created assets from expenses or overstated revenues, costing investors billions of dollars and resulting in both organizations declaring bankruptcy (Albrecht, Albrecht, Albrecht & Zimbelman, 2012). Nine factors contributed to fraud triangle creating this perfect fraud storm, and assisting management in concealing the fraud until exposed and rectified.

Enron was formed through the merger of Houston Natural Gas (HNG) of Houston, Texas and InterNorth of Omaha, Nebraska. HNG covered the Florida and California market, their pipelines running from east to west. InterNorth catered the Iowa and Minnesota market, their pipelines running from north to south. HNG was formed in 1920, providing gas to retail customers in Houston. The company sold its retail gas business in 1920 and ventured into the gas exploration and production business. In the year 1984, HNG had $3.7 billion in assets, over $2 billion in sales and booked profits of $123 million. In 1984, InterNorth had revenues of $7.5 billion. The reason behind the merger was that InterNorth faced the threat of a buyout by corporate raiders as it had low debt and high revenues. The conservative operations and low debt of InterNorth made it a target for corporate raiders who planned to use its cash reserves and borrowing capacity to extract funds for themselves. On the other hand, HNG had borrowed heavily to expand its pipelines in the Florida and California markets. Therefore, merging with Houston Natural Gas made perfect sense as it fended off corporate raiders. In May 1984, InterNorth acquired HNG for $2.4 billion, under the leadership of Sam Segnar who was the CEO of InterNorth at that time. The negotiations for HNG were handled by John Wing and he was able to negotiate a price for HNG shares which was 40% higher than the ongoing market price.

Years ago, a series of financial frauds and collapses was occurs in United States. Includes Enron, Global Crossing, Worldcom, Healthsouth, AIG and Lehman Brothers scandals. In the American capital market, the investors abandoned a number of large listed companies leads to the bankruptcy for those companies. The corporate frauds not only deceive investors, but also make oneself paid a heavy price. At the same time, it not only harm the capital market, but also caused a significant impact on American that resulted in regulation changes. These purpose of corporate fraud and reason are different, which Enron’s financial fraud is typical event and influence accounting filed lots. Because Enron is the beginning of the series of financial frauds in American, and secondly is form growth to the bankruptcy of Enron, has attracted American media and public, the third reason is Enron’s event also lead to the world top five accounting firm Arthur Anderson collapses.

Enron, once known as the worldwide leader in energy trading, began as a natural gas pipeline company. “At its peak, Enron brokered up to 20 percent of America’s energy transactions. These included basic contracts to deliver natural gas from wells to pipelines for distribution to homes, contracts for the purchase of electrical power facility out port, and more complex financial contracts, which allowed power companies to manage price and market risk” (Ackman).

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?