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Enron ethical failures in leadership
Enron: Were they the crookedest guys in the room
Enron ethical failures in leadership
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“Fraud is the daughter of greed” said British novelist, Jonathan Gash. In the documentary, "Bigger Than Enron," Hedrick Smith discusses how regulatory agencies such as accountants, banks, lawyers, auditors and politicians didn’t try to save such a huge and high-powered corporation as Enron and other companies. Enron was one of America’s largest corporations which was producing electricity, national gas and employed 20,000 people who weren’t aware of what the executives and accountants were doing. Enron’s collapse occurred due to the fault of its executives who used their power in a wrong direction. They used information for their own gain and deluded their employees. Employees were obliged to put all their retirement plans into the stocks of Enron and at the moment of falling down of stocks, workers weren’t able to sell them, but heads could sell them any time. Enron’s positive reports were hiding downsides of the company only to hold their stocks at the ceiling level for a reason to get more investors. Enron’s failure caused by the greediness of its executives and the fact that no one stopped them and even favored in such crime. For example, their …show more content…
Not even one person with an ethical understanding of business was found from the accountants, lawyers or auditors to prevent such enormous fraud. They did a variety of immoral actions, which they thought would stay undercover, but led to the bankruptcy of Enron. The executives overindulged in stealing money from their shareholders. They couldn’t stop, and they gambled Enron for couple of years. Arthur Andersen, which was supposed to be one of the most prestigious and important independent auditor companies, checked the books which were obviously incorrect and hide that fact in hope to save their big
Another reason for Enron’s bankruptcy was the unnecessary personal spending by corporate managers. It was a direct loss to the company’s shareholders. In the later stages before its bankruptcy, the luxuries were paid from the company’s borrowing, as it had no real profits. Therefore in the later stages, the creditors were at a loss rather than its shareholders.
Investors and the media once considered Enron to be the company of the future. The company had detailed code of ethics and powerful front men like Kenneth Lay, who is the son of a Baptist minister and whose own son was studying to enter the ministry (Flynt 1). Unfortunately the Enron board waived the company’s own ethic code requirements to allow the company’s Chief Financial Officer to serve as a general partner for the partnership that Enron was using as a conduit for much of its business. They also allowed discrepancies of millions of dollars. It was not until whistleblower Sherron S. Watkins stepped forward that the deceit began to unravel. Enron finally declared bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, leaving employees with out jobs or money.
I believe that Enron’s top executives, mainly Lay and Skilling, are mainly to blame for the Enron collapse. Lay and Skilling were surely able to lead an effective and efficient company, but they lacked self- control and let their greed get the best of them. They encouraged a competitive environment that, a survival of the fittest mentality, causing employees to constantly worried about their j...
Enron was formed following a merger between two natural gas companies in 1985, Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth.3 When Enron formed, it had accumulated a large sum of debt, roughly 2 billion dollars.4 As a result of deregulation, Enron no longer had the exclusive rights to its pipelines, resulting in the company hemorrhaging money. Kenneth Lay5, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Houston Natural Gas, became Enron’s CEO. Lay knew he had to quickly come up with a new innovation to keep the company afloat. Lay hired McKinsey & Company6 to help in coming up with a business strategy for Enron. McKinsey & Company assigned Jeffrey Skilling7 to Enron’s company as a consultant. Skilling, who had a background in banking, asset and liability management, came up with a solution to Enron’s financial crisis in the gas pipeline business. He said to create a “gas bank”, in which Enron would buy gas from a network of suppliers and sell it to a network of consumers, allowing them to control the supply and price of the gas. Enron’s debt was no more, and Lay was so impressed with Skilling, that he created a new d...
The Enron Scandal made millions of investors devastated. Enron’s stock prices were at $90.75 per share and fell to $0.61 in one day, which caused them to go bankrupt that day. Enron had experienced tremendous financial losses. The bankruptcy resulted from arrogance, greed from foolishness from the top management all the way down. Enron made lots of mistakes leading to their bankruptcy.
The three main crooks Chairman Ken Lay, CEO Jeff Skilling, and CFO Andrew Fastow, are as off the rack as they come. Fastow was skimming from Enron by ripping off the con artists who showed him how to steal, by hiding Enron debt in dummy corporations, and getting rich off of it. Opportunity theory is ever present because since this scam was done once without penalty, it was done plenty of more times with ease. Skilling however, was the typical amoral nerd, with delusions of grandeur, who wanted to mess around with others because he was ridiculed as a kid, implementing an absurd rank and yank policy that led to employees grading each other, with the lowest graded people being fired. Structural humiliation played a direct role in shaping Skilling's thoughts and future actions. This did not mean the worst employees were fired, only the least popular, or those who were not afraid to tell the truth. Thus, the corrupt culture of Enron was born. At one point, in an inter...
On the surface, the motives behind decisions and events leading to Enron’s downfall appear simple enough: individual and collective greed born in an atmosphere of market euphoria and corporate arrogance. Hardly anyone—the company, its employees, analysts or individual investors—wanted to believe the company was too good to be true. So, for a while, hardly anyone did. Many kept on buying the stock, the corporate mantra and the dream. In the meantime, the company made many high-risk deals, some of which were outside the company’s typical asset risk control process. Many went sour in the early months of 2001 as Enron’s stock price and debt rating imploded because of loss of investor and creditor trust. Methods the company used to disclose its complicated financial dealings were all wrong and downright deceptive. The company’s lack of accuracy in reporting its financial affairs, followed by financial restatements disclosing billions of dollars of omitted liabilities and losses, contributed to its downfall. The whole affair happened under the watchful eye of Arthur Andersen LLP, which kept a whole floor of auditors assigned at Enron year-round.
Enron was in trouble because of something that almost every major corporation during this time was guilty of. They inflated their profits. Things weren't looking good for them at the end of the 2001-year, so they made a common move and they restated their profits for the past four years. If this had worked to their like they could have gotten away with hiding millions of dollars in debt. That completely admitted that they had inflated their profits by hiding debt in confusing partner agreements. Enron could not deal with their debt so they did the only thing that was left to do, they filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. This went down as one of the largest companies to file for bankruptcy in the history of the United States. In just three months their share price dropped from $95 to below $1.
Due to an understatement of debts, the company was considered bankrupt in 2001. Shareholders lost $74 billion and a lot of jobs were lost because of the bankruptcy. The share prices of Enron started falling in 2000 and in 2001 the company revealed a huge loss. Even after all this, the company’s executives told the investors that the stock was just undervalued and they wanted their investors to keep on investing. The investors lost trust in the company as stock prices decreased, which led the company to file bankruptcy in December 2001.
Enron Corporation was based in Houston, Texas and participated in the wholesale exchange of American energy and commodities (ex. electricity and natural gas). Enron found itself in the middle of a very public accounting fraud scandal in the early 2000s. The corruption of Enron’s CFO and top executives bring to question their ethics and ethical culture of the company. Additionally, examining Enron ethics, their organization culture, will help to determine how their criminal acts could have been prevented.
Unethical accounting practices involving Enron date back to 1987. Enron’s use of creative accounting involved moving profits from one period to another to manipulate earnings. Anderson, Enron’s auditor, investigated and reported these unusual transactions to Enron’s audit committee, but failed to discuss the illegality of the acts (Girioux, 2008). Enron decided the act was immaterial and Anderson went along with their decision. At this point, the auditor’s should have reevaluated their risk assessment of Enron’s internal controls in light of how this matter was handled and the risks Enron was willing to take The history of unethical accounting practic...
Enron’s stock price fell from 90 dollars to 50 cents a share. Because of the executive’s choice, the employees lost their entire pension fund and any other money they had invested in the company.
“When a company called Enron… ascends to the number seven spot on the Fortune 500 and then collapses in weeks into a smoking ruin, its stock worth pennies, its CEO, a confidante of presidents, more or less evaporated, there must be lessons in there somewhere.” - Daniel Henninger.
Enron was on the of the most successful and innovative companies throughout the 1990s. In October of 2001, Enron admitted that its income had been vastly overstated; and its equity value was actually a couple of billion dollars less than was stated on its income statement (The Fall of Enron, 2016). Enron was forced to declare bankruptcy on December 2, 2001. The primary reasons behind the scandal at Enron was the negligence of Enron’s auditing group Arthur Andersen who helped the company to continually perpetrate the fraud (The Fall of Enron, 2016). The Enron collapse had a huge effect on present accounting regulations and rules.
The Enron Corporation was an American energy company that provided natural gas, electricity, and communications to its customers both wholesale and retail globally and in the northwestern United States (Ferrell, et al, 2013). Top executives, prestigious law firms, trusted accounting firms, the largest banks in the finance industry, the board of directors, and other high powered people, all played a part in the biggest most popular scandal that shook the faith of the American people in big business and the stock market with the demise of one of the top Fortune 500 companies that made billions of dollars through illegal and unethical gains (Ferrell, et al, 2013). Many shareholders, employees, and investors lost their entire life savings, investments,