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Nonbanks can follow identical strategies, which is what Enron did in the 1990s when it lobbied its accounts and the government to permit it to mark to market its contracts for the future supply of energy and Internet services to market.- C. William Thomas, The Rise and Fall of Enron: When a Company Looks Too Good to be True, it Usually is, J. ACCT., Apr. 2002, available at http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2002/Apr/ TheRiseAndFallOfEnron.htm

That change in accounting convention let Enron treat its anticipated gains as though they had already
Mark-to-market Accounting
In 1990, Jeffery Skilling joined Enron Corporation and in 1997, he was appointed as the company's Chief Executive Officer. Skilling demanded to change Enron's accounting system from a straightforward kind of accounting were Enron had listed actual revenue and costs of supplying and selling gas to the mark-to-market accounting system. The mark-to-market method requires estimations of future incomes when a long-term contract is signed. These estimations were based on the future net value of the cash flow, costs related to the contract were often hard to predict. This means that the estimated income from projects were included in Enron's accounting even though the money was not yet received and if there were any changes such as additional income or loss it would show up in subsequent periods. Investors were given misleading information because of the deviation in the estimations.
Enron was the first non-financial company to use the mark-to-market method. The U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission gave Enron their approval to use the method on January
30,1992. (The smartest guy in the room, 2004)

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