Enron White Collar Crime

There are three major factors associated with white-collar crime. The drive for profit is not a bad thing until all you care about is making money and the safety of people is no longer a priority. The structure of a company makes it very difficult to find one single individual who is responsible when an order can be carried out by a number of people just listening to the boss. The culture of an organizations are the beliefs and actions that influence the employees of a company. Michael L. Benson says in his book, "The offenders argued that they were merely following established and necessary industry practices. These practices were presented as being necessary for the well-being of the industry as a whole, not to mention their own companies as well." The offenders truly believe that what they were

In Enron the people high up in the chain of command showed how their drive for profit became more important than the employees of Enron. In the documentary it was stated that in the early stages of the company, every year they would lay off 15% of the employees based on coworker evaluations. Every person was rated on a scale of one to five, one being the best and five being the worst, and at least 10 to 15 percent had to be rated a five which meant termination from the company. Another example for Enron's drive for profit was the fact that they knew the company was going down so they sold all their assets and made millions of dollars, leaving thousands of employees jobless. The complicated structure of Enron made it more difficult for authorities to pin the crimes of the company on certain people. Enron had assets in many different companies and if the company didn't reach the projected amount of money then the ranking officials of Enron would transfer the loss to an off-the-books corporation where no one would find it. Enron