Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,3, Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, course: Auditing / Wirtschaftsprüfung, language: English, abstract: This essay discusses the scandal of Enron Corporation. In the first part, main reasons having led to its sudden and scandalous downfall will be explained; in particular accounting and business practices as well as corporate governance will be outlined. Subsequently, in the second part, important parties having been involved will be shown; notably the role of the auditing company Arthur Andersen and their conduct will be analyzed. In a final step, aftermaths for Enron, Arthur Andersen and further involved actors will be outlined. A special focus will be on consequences for the accounting world and how regulations have been changed in order to prevent future accounting violations.
What went wrong with American business at the end of the 20th century? Until the spring of 2001, Enron epitomized the triumph of the New Economy. Feared by rivals, worshipped by investors, Enron seemingly could do no wrong. Its profits rose every year; its stock price surged ever upward; its leaders were hailed as visionaries. Then a young Fortune writer, Bethany McLean, wrote an article posing a simple question - how, exactly, does Enron make its money? Within a year Enron was facing humiliation and bankruptcy, the largest in US history, which caused Americans to lose faith in a system that rewarded top insiders with millions of dollars, while small investors lost everything. It was revealed that Enron was a company whose business was an illusion, an illusion that Wall Street was willing to accept even though they knew what the real truth was. This book tells the extraordinary story of Enron's fall. 'The best book about the Enron debacle to date' BusinessWeek 'The authors write with power and finesse. Their prose is effortless, like a sprinter floating down the track' USA Today 'Well-reported and well-written' Warren Buffett
Techniques to uncover and avoid accounting frauds and scams Inflated profits . . . Suspicious write-offs . . . Shifted expenses . . . These and other dubious financial maneuvers have taken on a contemporary twist as companies pull out the stops in seeking to satisfy Wall Street. Financial Shenanigans pulls back the curtain on the current climate of accounting fraud. It presents tools that anyone who is potentially affected by misleading business valuationsfrom investors and lenders to managers and auditorscan use to research and read financial reports, and to identify early warning signs of a company's problems. A bestseller in its first edition, Financial Shenanigans has been thoroughly updated for today's marketplace. New chapters, data, and research reveal contemporary "shenanigans" that have been known to fool even veteran researchers.
A Brookings Institution Press and American Enterprise Institute publication A few years ago, Americans held out their systems of corporate governance and financial disclosure as models to be emulated by the rest of the world. But in late 2001 U.S. policymakers and corporate leaders found themselves facing the largest corporate accounting scandals in American history. The spectacular collapses of Enron and Worldcom—as well as the discovery of accounting irregularities at other large U.S. companies—seemed to call into question the efficacy of the entire system of corporate governance in the United States. In response, Congress quickly enacted a comprehensive package of reform measures in what has come to be known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ followed by making fundamental changes to their listing requirements. The private sector acted as well. Accounting firms—watching in horror as one of their largest, Arthur Andersen, collapsed after a criminal conviction for document shredding—tightened their auditing procedures. Stock analysts and ratings agencies, hit hard by a series of disclosures about their failings, changed their practices as well. Will these reforms be enough? Are some counterproductive? Are other shortcomings in the disclosure system still in need of correction? These are among the questions that George Benston, Michael Bromwich, Robert E. Litan, and Alfred Wagenhofer address in Following the Money. While the authors agree that the U.S. system of corporate disclosure and governance is in need of change, they are concerned that policymakers may be overreacting in some areas and taking actions in others that may prove to be ineffective or even counterproductive. Using the Enron case as a point of departure, the authors argue that the major problem lies not in the accounting and auditing standards themselves, but in the system of enforcing those standards.
“They’re still trying to hide the weenie,” thought Sherron Watkins as she read a newspaper clipping about Enron two weeks before Christmas, 2001. . . It quoted [CFO] Jeff McMahon addressing the company’s creditors and cautioning them against a rash judgment. “Don’t assume that there is a smoking gun.” Sherron knew Enron well enough to know that the company was in extreme spin mode… Power Failure is the electrifying behind-the-scenes story of the collapse of Enron, the high-flying gas and energy company touted as the poster child of the New Economy that, in its hubris, had aspired to be “The World’s Leading Company,” and had briefly been the seventh largest corporation in America. Written by prizewinning journalist Mimi Swartz, and substantially based on the never-before-published revelations of former Enron vice-president Sherron Watkins, as well as hundreds of other interviews, Power Failure shows the human face beyond the greed, arrogance, and raw ambition that fueled the company’s meteoric rise in the late 1990s. At the dawn of the new century, Ken Lay’s and Jeff Skilling's faces graced the covers of business magazines, and Enron’s money oiled the political machinery behind George W. Bush’s election campaign. But as Wall Street analysts sang Enron’s praises, and its stock spiraled dizzyingly into the stratosphere, the company’s leaders were madly scrambling to manufacture illusory profits, hide its ballooning debt, and bully Wall Street into buying its fictional accounting and off-balance-sheet investment vehicles. The story of Enron’s fall is a morality tale writ large, performed on a stage with an unforgettable array of props and side plots, from parking lots overflowing with Boxsters and BMWs to hot-house office affairs and executive tantrums. Among the cast of characters Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins observe with shrewd Texas eyes and an insider’s perspective are: CEO Ken Lay, Enron’s “outside face,” who was more interested in playing diplomat and paving the road to a political career than in managing Enron’s high-testosterone, anything-goes culture; Jeff Skilling, the mastermind behind Enron’s mercenary trading culture, who transformed himself from a nerdy executive into the personification of millennial cool; Rebecca Mark, the savvy and seductive head of Enron’s international division, who was Skilling’s sole rival to take over the company; and Andy Fastow, whose childish pranks early in his career gave way to something far more destructive. Desperate to be a player in Enron’s deal-making, trader-oriented culture, Fastow transformed Enron’s finance department into a “profit center,” creating a honeycomb of financial entities to bolster Enron’s “profits,” while diverting tens of millions of dollars into his own pockets An unprecedented chronicle of Enron’s shocking collapse, Power Failure should take its place alongside the classics of previous decades – Barbarians at the Gate and Liar’s Poker – as one of the cautionary tales of our times.
A definitive new reference on the major failures of American corporate governance at the start of the 21st century. Tracing the market boom and bust that preceded Enron's collapse, as well as the aftermath of that failure, the book chronicles the meltdown in the telecom sector that gave rise to accounting scandals globally. Featuring expert analysis of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation that was adopted in response to these scandals, the author also investigates the remarkable market recovery that followed the scandals. An exhaustive guide to the collapse of the Enron Corporation and other financial scandals that erupted in the wake of the market downturn of 2000, this book is an essential resource for students, teachers and professionals in corporate governance, finance, and law.
This paper presents a brief historical overview of Enron's rise and fall and summarizes what the authors currently know about (1) the evolution of Enron's business model, (2) those organizational processes relied upon by senior Enron officials to drive and monitor the business, (3) emergent behavior related to the structuring, management, and valuation of major partnerships, and (4)oversight provided by Enron's management and board of directors. It concludes by posing the question of how Enron's story as anew, post-deregulation corporate model could have escaped critical analysis by the financial community, the business press, and other observers for so long. As such, this paper is an exercise in description, not interpretation. Since many of the facts about Enron's rise and fall have yet to be determined and agreed upon, this description must be considered tentative and incomplete. Nevertheless, the broad contours of the Enron story presented in this paper provide a sufficient basis for developing initial hypotheses about what might have caused such a swift and ignominious fall and what business and public policies might best protect employees, shareholders, and other relevant parties in the future from the kind of injuries experienced in Enron's swift decline into bankruptcy.
After the shocking collapse of Enron in fall, 2001 came an equally shocking series of disclosures about how America's seventh-largest company had destroyed itself. There were unethical deals, offshore accounts, and accounting irregularities. There were Wall Street analysts who seemed to have been asleep on the job. There were the lies top executives told so that they could line their own pockets while workers and shareholders lost billions. But after all these disclosures, the question remains: Why? Why did a thriving, innovative company with rock-solid cash flow and reliable earnings suddenly flame out in a maelstrom of corruption, fraud and skulduggery? The answer, Texas business journalist Robert Bryce reveals in this incisive and entertaining book, is that bad business practices begin with human beings. Pipe Dreams traces Enron's astounding transformation from a small regional gas pipeline company into an energy Goliath...and then tracks step-by-step, business decision by business decision, extra-marital affair by extra-marital affair, how, when and why the culture of Enron began to go rotten, and who was responsible. The story of Enron's fall isn't just a story about accounting procedures; it's a story about people. Bryce tells that story with all the personality, passion, humor, and inside dope you'd hope for, and the result is an un-putdownable read in the tradition of Barbarians at the Gate and The Predators' Ball.
This encyclopedia, edited by the past editors and founder of the Journal of Business Ethics, is the only reference work dedicated entirely to business and professional ethics. Containing over 2000 entries, this multi-volume, major research reference work provides a broad-based disciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to all of the key topics in the field. The encyclopedia draws on three interdisciplinary and over-lapping fields: business ethics, professional ethics and applied ethics although the main focus is on business ethics. The breadth of scope of this work draws upon the expertise of human and social scientists, as well as that of professionals and scientists in varying fields. This work has come to fruition by making use of the expert academic input from the extraordinarily rich population of current and past editorial board members and section editors of and contributors to the Journal of Business Ethics.
