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A month after the twin towers fell in New York City the nation's focus was shifted to the Enron scandal. Kenneth Lay and Jeffery Skilling were names in the press almost every day. Enron filed bankruptcy and thousands lost their jobs and pensions. Another company involved in the scandal was Arthur Andersen, an accounting firm; Enron was their client. Arthur Andersen continued to perform bad audits even after a warning from SEC. If Arthur Andersen employees had been ethical, after the warning, the Enron Scandal would not have had led to the conviction and dissolution of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm.
Arthur E. Andersen was born in a small town in Illinois and by the age of 16, he was an orphan. He was out in the world on his own. Luckily, his father’s employer was kind enough to allow Andersen to work in the mailroom at Fraser & Chalmers. He attended college courses at night while making his way from the mailroom to the assistant controller position. Andersen joined Price Waterhouse & Co and then took his Certified Public Accounting exam. He also was a professor at Northwestern University. He was very ambitious and according to Susan Squires who wrote Inside Arthur Andersen, “Arthur E. Andersen was an entrepreneur” (28).
People were moving to the cities and leaving their farms behind during the 1910’s. These people needed accountants. “On December 1, 1913, Andersen and Clarence M. DeLany opened a small accounting practice, Andersen, DeLany & Co. Arthur E. Andersen was only 28” (Squires 28). The accounting firm specialized in tax and offered consulting services. In 1915, another office opened in Milwaukee. By 1919, offices were from one end of the United States to another including Kansas City and Houston. ...
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...st Arthur Andersen because of flaws in jury instructions. The instructions were too ambiguous to determine if obstruction of justice had happened. The overturned conviction was too late for Arthur Andersen. The firm lost it all when an email was sent. The unethical actions of Nancy Temple and David Duncan cost many their jobs. The ethical values of Arthur Andersen employees at the time should have been enforce, had this been done the conviction and dissolution of the firm would not have happened.
Works Cited
Glater, Jonathan. "Enron Trail Stirs Memory of Andersen." New York Times 21 Feb 2006, web.
McRoberts, Flynn. "The Fall of Andersen." Chicago Tribune 1 Sept 2002, web.
Sloan, Allan. "The Jury's In: Greed Isn't Good." Newsweek. 24 June 2002: 37-38.
Squires, Susan. Inside Arthur Andersen: shifting values, unexpected consequences. FT Press, 2003. Print
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.
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.
"Andrew Fastow Draws on Enron Failure in Speech on Ethics at CU." - The Denver Post. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Apr. 2014.
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.
N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Nov. 2011. us/investigate/white_collar>. Prentice, Robert. " ENRON: A BRIEF BEHAVIORAL AUTOPSY.
T.A., L. 1996. Richard Brown, Chartered accountant and Christian gentleman. In: Lee, T. eds. 1996. Shaping the Accountancy Profession: The Story of Three Scottish Pioneers. New York, Garland: pp. 153-221.
Enron. (2011, March 18). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 19, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Enron&oldid=419486167
Flynt, Sean. “Enron Whistleblower Tells Chilling Tale of Corporate Ruin.” Samford University. Ed. Donna Fitch. 19 Feb. 2004. 3 Mar. 2005.
"This is why the market keeps going down every day - investors don't know who to trust," said Brett Trueman, an accounting professor from the University of California-Berkeley's Haas School of Business. As these things come out, it just continues to build up"(CBS MarketWatch, Hancock). The memories of the Frauds at Enron and WorldCom still haunt many investors. There have been many accounting scandals in the United States history. The Enron and the WorldCom accounting fraud affected thousands of people and it caused many changes in the rules and regulation of the corporate world. There are many similarities and differences between the two scandals and many rules and regulations have been created in order to prevent frauds like these. Enron Scandal occurred before WorldCom and despite the devastating affect of the Enron Scandal, new rules and regulations were not created in time to prevent the WorldCom Scandal. Accounting scandals like these has changed the corporate world in many ways and people are more cautious about investing because their faith had been shaken by the devastating effects of these scandals. People lost everything they had and all their life-savings. When looking at the accounting scandals in depth, it is unbelievable how much to the extent the accounting standards were broken.
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 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.
“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.
Prior to 2000, Enron was an American energy, commodities and service international company. Enron claimed that revenue is more than 102 millions (Healy & Palepu 2003, p.6). Fortune named Enron “American most innovative company” for six consecutive years (Ehrenberg 2011, paragraph 3). That is the reason why Enron became an admired company before 2000. Unfortunately, most of the net income for the years 1997-2000 is overstated because of unethical accounting errors (Benston & Hartgraves 2002, p. 105). In the next paragraph, three main accounting issues will identify for what led to the fall of Enron.
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,