...www.ccsenet.org/ijbm International Journal of Business and Management Vol. 5, No. 10; October 2010 The Case Analysis of the Scandal of Enron Yuhao Li Huntsman School of Business, Utah State University, Logan city, U.S.A E-mail: wyl_2001_ren@126.com, carolee1989@gmail.com Abstract The Enron scandal, revealed in October 2001, eventually led to the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation, an American energy company based in Houston, Texas, and the dissolution of Arthur Andersen, which was one of the five largest audit and accountancy partnerships in the world. In addition to being the largest bankruptcy reorganization in American history at that time, Enron undoubtedly is the biggest audit failure. It is ever the most famous company in the world, but it also is one of companies which fell down too fast. In this paper, it analysis the reason for this event in detail including the management, conflict of interest and accounting fraud. Meanwhile, it makes analysis the moral responsibility From Individuals’ Angle and Corporation’s Angle. Keywords: Enron scandal, Accounting fraud, Moral responsibility, Analysis 1. Review of Enron’s Rise and Fall Throughout the late 1990s, Enron was almost universally considered one of the country's most innovative companies -- a new-economy maverick that forsook musty, old industries with their cumbersome hard assets in favor of the freewheeling world of e-commerce. The company continued to build power plants and operate gas lines, but it became...
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...www.ccsenet.org/ijbm International Journal of Business and Management Vol. 5, No. 10; October 2010 The Case Analysis of the Scandal of Enron Yuhao Li Huntsman School of Business, Utah State University, Logan city, U.S.A E-mail: wyl_2001_ren@126.com, carolee1989@gmail.com Abstract The Enron scandal, revealed in October 2001, eventually led to the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation, an American energy company based in Houston, Texas, and the dissolution of Arthur Andersen, which was one of the five largest audit and accountancy partnerships in the world. In addition to being the largest bankruptcy reorganization in American history at that time, Enron undoubtedly is the biggest audit failure. It is ever the most famous company in the world, but it also is one of companies which fell down too fast. In this paper, it analysis the reason for this event in detail including the management, conflict of interest and accounting fraud. Meanwhile, it makes analysis the moral responsibility From Individuals’ Angle and Corporation’s Angle. Keywords: Enron scandal, Accounting fraud, Moral responsibility, Analysis 1. Review of Enron’s Rise and Fall Throughout the late 1990s, Enron was almost universally considered one of the country's most innovative companies -- a new-economy maverick that forsook musty, old industries with their cumbersome hard assets in favor of the freewheeling world of e-commerce. The company continued to build power plants and operate gas lines, but it became...
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...as competition or government regulation. These factors contribute to the performance, success or failure, and survival or fall of an organization. Organizational-behavior theories help to explain the collapse of Enron and how leadership, management, and organizational structure contributed to its failure. Organizational Structure With a market capitalization of nearly $74 billion, Enron was one of the world’s leading energy companies by the late 1990s. However, it had gained this status through the perpetration of illegal activities at the very highest levels of the organization. Enron’s fall was because of the organizational-level corruption that grew from its structure and trickled down to the collective behavior of its employees. Enron’s top-down, hierarchical structure by unit grouping meant that the top management team either directly or indirectly through their subordinates influenced the actions of the organization. For example, the structure of the accounting department allowed it to disregard legal requirements through “structural secrecy” that Enron’s executives could exploit (Beenen & Pinto, 2009, p. 283). As part of its strategy to grow its business, Enron’s leadership engaged in aggressive political lobbying to convince the government to deregulate its business activities (Kulik, O’Fallon, Salimath, 2008, p. 706). Organizations like Enron, whose activities are controlled by external factors, such as the government, tend to centralize power at the apex of the structure...
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...The Enron Corporation Scandal Yolanda M. Allen Business Law I/LEG 100 Strayer University Instructor: Prof. Bryan Smith 20 August 2011 The Enron Corporation Scandal Describe how Enron could have been structured differently to avoid such activities. The origins of Enron started with the merger of Kenneth Lay’s company, Houston Natural Gas with InterNorth, a Nebraska-based pipeline company in 1985. Initially, from the beginning, Enron began to show some cracks in its structure, as the company started acquiring huge amounts of debt during its foundation, and as a result of the deregulation of gas pipelines, it no longer had exclusive rights to its own pipelines (Thomas, C.B., 2002). To solve Enron’s credit and revenue problems, Kenneth Lay, CEO hired Jeffrey Skilling, who eventually became the company’s Chief Financial Officer to the CEO in 1996. Almost overnight, Skilling turned Enron into a major market middleman for energy that would dominate the trading market. After many years of seemingly huge successes, more cracks began to appear in the Enron crown. In the final analysis, the conspiracy of Lay, Skilling and others led to the collapse of the company due to fraud, false reporting of revenue, shoddy accounting practices and a general disregard for virtually every tenet of business ethics. Building a robust ethics infrastructure that is self-sustaining, by composing a sound code of conduct that supports the top level, and communicating it to all employees...
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...the general public and shareholders from accounting errors, unethical behavior, and corporate scandal. There are 11 titles that include the requirements for reporting, retention period for records storage, management of electronic records, and standards for external auditors. The act is supervised by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and administered by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Sarbox requires the CEO and CFO to certify and be liable for the annual and quarterly reports that are filed. If the financial reports are discovered to be untrue, such acts of noncompliance are fines, imprisonment, or both, depending on the severity. The Act was designed for publicly traded companies only, in reaction to scandals such as Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco. These scandals cost investors billions of dollars when the companies collapsed, or the stocks plummeted. These companies altered or destroyed records, defrauded shareholders, or “cooked the books”. When a company cooks the books, it means that incorrect information has been used to create their financial statements. They manipulate earnings and expenses to improve the bottom line, or earnings per share (EPS). This manipulation of information is used to bring in new investors, keep the shareholders happy, attain a bonus, and reach their budget goals. Banks review these statements for loan applications. Investors and company managers use them to analyze how well the company is doing. Accounting...
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...task Enron: How the Failure of Leadership, Culture, and Unethical Behavior Brought a Giant to its Knees Background A company with humble beginnings, Enron began as a merger of two Houston pipeline companies in 1985. Although Enron faced a number of financially difficult years, the deregulation of the electrical power markets took effect in 1988, and the company redefined its business from "energy delivery" to "energy broker." Enron quickly changed from a surviving company to a thriving one. Deregulation allowed Enron to become a matchmaker in the power industry, bringing buyers and sellers together. Enron profited from the exchanges, generating revenue from the difference between the buying and selling prices. Deregulation allowed Enron to be creative—for the first time, a company that had been required to operate within the lines could innovate and test limits. Over time, Enron's contracts became increasingly diverse and significantly more complex. Customers could insure themselves against all sorts of eventualities—such as a rise or fall in interest rates, a change in the weather, or a customer's inability to pay. By the end, the volume of such financial contracts far outstripped the volume of contracts to deliver actual commodities, and Enron was employing a small army of Ph.D.s in mathematics, physics, and economics to help manage its risk. As Enron's products and services evolved, so did the company's culture. In this newly deregulated and innovative forum, Enron embraced...
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...information that I did not know about at all before and to understand how accounting works outside of the classroom as I have been taught all about the concepts in the accounting classes I have taken so far. I would have never thought of the past repeating itself in the financial market world, but as the book talks about, the Arthur Andersen scandal that gave the creation of new acts and regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley act shows that unscrupulous behavior has existed way before companies such as Enron and WorldCom made world headlines when it was revealed that they had overstated their earnings. These scandals cots investors billions of dollars and shattered the dreams of thousands of people and their confidence in the nation’s security markets. (Never was I aware of the past repeating itself in a revolving financial market. I was more or less aware of how Sarbanes-Oxley came about after the fall of Enron, and the Arthur Andersen major part in helping the top executives at Enron forge numbers to increase its earnings. There is a phrase they have on Wall Street. It’s called raising the bar. If you can raised the bar, or brighten the outlook for your company, if you can see your growth accelerating, your stock will go higher and you will be given the currency to expand, acquire, and do whatever you want” (pg. 178.) This is the main reason why our noble citizens easily turned in to con men without hesitating and take advantage of good honest people. In the book, Berenson talks...
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.... Burton Final Paper: The Enron Scandal MSA 602 Dr. Pendarvis 12-4-2011 Abstract Enron's collapse is generally viewed as a morality tale - the natural result of managerial greed, a clueless board, and feckless gatekeepers. But none of these aspects of the story clearly distinguishes Enron from other major firms during the bubble era of the late 90s. This material identifies certain economic facts from the many moving parts that was Enron, and organizes them along two main threads. The first describes Enron's major businesses, and the incentives and constraints under which the managers of those businesses operated. The second thread describes the basic financial engineering tools developed by Enron's finance department. These threads are then woven into the timeline of Enron's ultimate collapse. What emerges is a tale of how bad bets that resulted in good outcomes came to be viewed by top management and the board as bets worth repeating on an ever-larger scale. Early success in highly risky ventures were ramped up and duplicated, under perverse incentives, into a financial disaster. The firm then doubled down on that disaster with non-economic hedges developed by the finance group. The CFO, in a wholesale breach of his fiduciary responsibilities, including corruption of various gatekeepers, managed to cloak the poor quality of his hedges and his motivation in creating them. This duplicity prevented...
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...GDP is the key factor in any business cycle. The business cycle is figured out by the goods and services and the number of people employed. The business cycle is like an aggregate economic indicator and the GDP is the best one. The business cycle changes and has five stages: growth, peak, recession, trough, and recovery, and the GDP affect the business cycle because its factors affect the business cycle. When the GDP rises in the economy there is a growth in the business cycle, and when there is a fall in the GDP then there is a recession in the business cycle. (Hubbard & O’Brien, 2010) The government has a major part in shaping our national fiscal policies. The President and Congress make fiscal policies to help our economy. The Federal Open Market Committee monitors the economy. The Internal Revenue Service is a department that is in charge of making sure that everyone pays their share of taxes. The Federal Trade Commission department monitors all deals that have acquisition mergers, credit and loans, and regulate debt collection, example Enron. The Department of Treasury manages finances, collects taxes, manages government accounts and public debt, checks out international and domestic finances, monitors economic, trade, tax, and monetary policy, regulates tax and finance law, and investigates and prosecutes people who counterfeited and avoided taxes. The economic cycles are helped by the government fiscal policies. These fiscal policies change the interest...
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...The Favorable Impacts of Sarbanes-Oxley Act Outweigh its Unfavorable Impacts. 1. Introduction. As Eyden indicated in 2012, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, as the reaction to scandals and collapse of several business magnates between 2000 and 2002, aimed at strengthening the accountability of Financial Reporting and audit practices (SOX Has Restored Investors' Confidence, p2). The Act has made considerable contributions since passage. Staff of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reported in 2003 that a series of reforms and improvements regarding Financial Reporting and Accounting Regulations have been implemented since SOX (p.24). According to Hanna (2014), a survey conducted by the Financial Executives Research Foundation in 2005 presented that “83% of large company CFOs agreed that SOX had increased investor confidence.” (para.12). However, Engel, Hayes, and Wang (2004) indicated that many opposed the Act to be too costly and requires too much effort to adapt to its constant changes, especially for small businesses; and it had forced companies out of the public capital market due to the increasing complexity in regulations (p1). Despite all the criticism, the favorable impacts of SOX outweigh unfavorable ones because the Act has facilitated various Accounting Reforms and rebuilt investors’ confidence, both of which carry essential long-term benefits. Moreover, Highlights from Protiviti’s 2015 SOX Compliance Survey proved SOX-related expenses and efforts...
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...Lastly, we will discuss how the situations at Arthur Anderson may have played out differently if their senior management had displayed the habits of strong ethical leaders. Provide specific examples to support your response. Introduction Known as one of the Big Five the Arthur Andersen firm was founded in 1913 by Arthur Andersen and his partner Clarence Delany. The company name was very synonymous for their integrity, ethics and trust, which is necessary for an accounting firm to have and stand by. Our textbook states, “Andersen set standards for the accounting profession and advanced new initiatives on the strength of its then undeniable integrity (pg. 348). Andersen once shown a strong character but with the rise of many high-profile companies filing for bankruptcy, that same character would come into question. Analyzing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted to by U.S. Congress in 2002 to protect investors from the possibility of fraudulent accounting activities by corporations. We will look at this act and the legal compliance that it requires and see how this act could have prevented many of the questionable accounting practices that the company struggled/suffered...
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...Business Ethics: Enron Case Study Introduction: Enron was a very powerful company that was doing very well in the market. The value of its share was high and the company was enjoying an overall healthy position as a business. The employees were happy and new recruits would have killed to get a job at Enron. However, this was not to last. Enron enjoyed so much success that it got to its head and it started making all sorts of problems. Enron decided to change its organizational structure by employing new people at high posts who were given the opportunity to make big decisions that could directly affect the organization. Thus, their organizational design was altered. The reward system within the organization was also changed since the top performers were given the opportunity to receive many bonuses and stocks options. This new system was to be controlled by an internal controlling authority but this did not work well because the people who were reviewing and those who were being reviewed were working on the same levels and this caused them to form alliances among themselves. They all ‘looked out’ for each other and were not honest with their reviews, and everyone was given good reviews. Employees were scared to do something that would anger their superior and this is why they all became ‘yes men.’ This created a very unstable culture that was based on dishonesty and this caused Enron’s downfall. Division of Workers and Executives: The Culture at Enron Enron’s...
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...STUDY:- Once the seventh largest company in America, Enron was formed in 1985 when InterNorth acquired Houston Natural Gas. The company branched into many non-energy-related fields over the next several years, including such areas as Internet bandwidth, risk management, and weather derivatives (a type of weather insurance for seasonal businesses). Although their core business remained in the transmission and distribution of power their phenomenal growth was occurring through their other interests. Fortune Magazine selected Enron as "America's most innovative company" for six straight years from 1996 to 2001. Then came the investigations into their complex network of off-shore partnerships and accounting practices The saga of the ENRON Corporation has been unfolding in the media for well over a year. In the span of only three years, ENRON has gone from public and professional acclaim of the company and its senior executives to scorn, infamy and bankruptcy. Its public auditing firm, Arthur Andersen, has basically been destroyed, as well as publicly disgraced. Tens of thousands of employees and investors have been emotionally and financially affected. Major financial services firms in banking, securities brokerage and insurance have been, and may yet be, drawn into the legal battles regarding who is to blame for the ENRON failure. Enron grew wealthy due largely to marketing, promoting power, and its high stock price. Enron was named "America's Most Innovative Company" by Fortune...
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...Govt., Business, NGOs – Interface between them in the rise of globalization BUSINESS ETHICS PROJECT Govt., Business, NGOs – Interface between them in the rise of globalization BUSINESS ETHICS PROJECT Chand Ajmera, PGP/17/192 Ananya Jha, PGP/17/194 Shraddha Srikhande, PGP/17/240 Dinesh Kumar V, PGP/17/248 Chand Ajmera, PGP/17/192 Ananya Jha, PGP/17/194 Shraddha Srikhande, PGP/17/240 Dinesh Kumar V, PGP/17/248 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 2. ROLE OF CSOS IN BUSINESS GOVERNMENT INTERFACE 3. LOBBYING - INTRODUCTION 4. ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF LOBBYING 5. EXAMPLES OF LOBBYING 6. ACTIONS BEING TAKEN TO CURB THE UNETHICAL ASPECT OF LOBBYING 7. CONCLUSION & RECOMMENDATIONS 1. INTRODUCTION The growth and function of every business is highly dependent on the government. A large number of government actions in addition to laws and regulations affect companies’ finances. There are several reasons behind regulation of business by the government. 1. Public safety and welfare: Many industries are regularly reviewed and overseen because their activities, if they go skewed, can have detrimental effects to human health, financial well-being, or community structure. [21] 2. Protecting industry: Many regulations are in place to protect those who have developed their business correctly; licensing, permits, and inspections by the government clear out criminal activities that challenge truthful industries. [21] 3. Revenue...
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...chak de phattey The Call for Participation for Wikimania 2009 has been released. Submit your presentations before April 15. [Hide] [Help us with translations!] Enron scandal From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Enron Corporation Type Defunct / Asset-less Shell Founded Omaha, Nebraska, 1985 Headquarters Houston, Texas, United States Key people Kenneth Lay, Founder, former Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Skilling, former President, CEO and COO Andrew Fastow, former CFO Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche, former Vice Chairman, Chairman and CEO of Enron International Stephen F. Cooper, Interim CEO and CRO John J. Ray, III, Chairman Industry formerly Energy Revenue $101 billion (in 2000) Employees approx. 22,000 in 2000 approx. 4 as of 2008. Website http://www.enron.com/ The Enron scandal was a financial scandal involving Enron Corporation (former NYSE ticker symbol: ENE) and its accounting firm Arthur Andersen, that was revealed in late 2001. After a series of revelations involving irregular accounting procedures conducted throughout the 1990s, Enron was on the verge of bankruptcy by November 2001. A white knight rescue attempt by a similar, smaller energy company, Dynegy, was not viable. Enron filed for bankruptcy on December 2, 2001. As the scandal was revealed, Enron shares dropped from over US$90.00 to less than 50¢. Enron's plunge occurred after revelations that much of its profits and revenue were the result of deals with special...
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