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Nature of issue Enron company faced
Enron And The Enron Scandal assigments
Enron case study 20
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Introduction
The Houston based commodities, energy and service corporation Enron was involved in one of the biggest fraud cases in the United States of America. Underlying the fraud was the deception of reports and statements that gave a very inaccurate and misleading view about the company.
The Organisation, Time and Place
Enron Initiated as an interstate pipeline company through the merger of Houston Natural Gas and Omaha-based InterNorth in 1985.(The rise and fall of Enron: a brief history, 2006)
With this merge the previous CEO of Houston Natural Gas, Kenneth Lay, advanced and became the new CEO of Enron. He was very quick to rebrand Enron into an energy trader and supplier. In the year of 1999, Enron began to widen their scope
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It revealed that the firm’s success was due to an elaborate scam ranging from shady dealings to concealed debts. (Enron scandal at-a-glance, 2002). The year of 2001 was pivotal in revealing the depth of this deception. In August that year the company’s CEO Jeffery Skilling announced his departure, having been CEO for six months. The unexpected resignation was followed by many stakeholders selling large amounts of Enron stocks as the price continuously dropped. It reached a point where it was selling less than a dollar from a peak price of $90 per share. (Folger, 2011) Following the month of October saw Enron report a loss of $618 million, its first quarterly loss in four years. (The rise and fall of Enron: a brief history, 2006. The SEC opens a formal investigation into Enron’s dealings so they can get an insight into the activities that took place that resulted in the company making the abnormal loss. All attempt to sell the shares of the company ceased as there was too much debt in the company that had not been disclosed. in December, Enron filing for bankruptcy protection with $38 million in outstanding debt (Folger,
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.
The Enron Scandal, which unrolled in October 2001, lead to the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation, an American energy company based in Houston, Texas, and the de facto dissolution of Arthur Andersen, a large audit and accountancy partnership firm.
The Fastows headed to Mrs. Fastow's native Houston in 1990, both taking jobs at a young company called Enron. Just five years old, Enron was starting to evolve from a natural-gas and pipeline company into a trading firm. Mr. Fastow was one of the first managers hired by Mr. [Jeffrey Skilling], who himself had only recently arrived, from management consultants McKinsey & Co. Brought into Mr. Skilling's inner circle, Mr. Fastow returned the loyalty, telling colleagues he had named a child after his mentor. When Mr. Skilling became Enron's president and chief operating officer in early 1997, he and Mr. [Kenneth Lay] promoted Mr. Fastow to lead a new finance department. A year later, Mr. Fastow became chief financial officer.
The Enron Corporation was founded in 1985 out of Houston Texas and was one of the world 's major electricity, natural gas, communications, and pulp and paper companies that employed over 20,000 employees. This paper will address some of the ethical issues that plagued Enron and eventually led to its fall.
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.
Enron deliberately created artificial shortages in California for electricity, two days in a row, causing the price to skyrocket. Enron is a natural gas and electricity plant/business that buys and sells energy. The most influential historical event that has happened during the 21ST century is The Enron Scandal because the loss sustained by investors exceeded $70 billion and only a small amount of the lost money was returned.
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 Corporation started back in 1985. It was created as a merger of Houston Natural Gas and Omaha based InterNorth as a interstate pipeline company (CbcNews). Kenneth Lay was the former chief executive officer of Houston natural gas merged his company with another natural gas line company, Omaha Based InterNorth. During the time of the merger there were many arguments amongst the two companies and in the end Ken Lay the former C...
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.
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.
Enron and Arthur Anderson were both giants in their own industry. Enron, a Texas based company in the energy trading business, was expanding rapidly in both domestic and global markets. Arthur Anderson, LLC. (Anderson), based out of Chicago, was well established as one of the big five accounting firms. But the means by which they achieved this status became questionable and eventually contributed to their demise. Enron used what if often referred to as “creative” accounting methods, this resulted in them posting record breaking earnings. Anderson, who earned substantial audit and consultation fees from Enron, failed to comply with the auditing standards required in their line of work. Investigations and reports have resulted in finger pointing and placing blame, but both companies contributed to one of the most notorious accounting scandals in history. There remains much speculation as to what steps could and should have been taken to protect innocent victims and numerous investors from experiencing the enormous loses that resulted from this scandal.
In July 1985, the Texas based energy firm Enron Corporation was founded by Kenneth Lay by the merge of Houston Natural Gas and Inter-North. Enron primarily focused on the energy markets, due to electrical power markets becoming deregulated Enron expanded into trading electricity and other energy goods. With Enron growing, the company began moving into new markets. In 1999, Enron launched Enron Online, its website for trading goods. The rapid awareness and use of the business website made it the prime business site in the world with a substantial amount of transactions arising from Enron Online. The growth of Enron was extensive and in 2000, the firm was ranked the 7th largest energy firm in the world with year ending accounts 31 December 2000 showing a profit of $979 million and share prices soaring from $40 to $90 in one year.
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,