Accountancy Career Challenge: The Enron Story

Thursday, March 20, 2014

The Enron Story

Everyone is aware of a minimum of a bit concerning the Enron story and therefore the devastation it created within the lives of is workers. it is a story that belongs in any discussion of moral accounting processes and what happens once accounting standards and ethics area unit discarded for private greed.

Enron began in 1985 commercialism fossil fuel to gas corporations and businesses. In 1996, energy markets were modified so the value of energy might currently be set by competition among energy corporations rather than being fastened by government laws. With this variation, Enron began to perform a lot of as a middleman than a conventional energy provider, commerce in energy contracts rather than shopping for and commercialism fossil fuel.  Enron's rising created excitement among investors and drove the stock worth up. As Enron grew, it distended into different industries like net services, and its money contracts became a lot of sophisticated.

In order to stay growing at this rate, Enron began to borrow cash to take a position in new comes. However, as a result of this debt would build their earnings look less spectacular, Enron began to make partnerships that might enable it to stay debt off of its books. One partnership created by Enron, Chewco Investments (named when the Star Wars character Chew bacca) allowed Enron to stay $600 million in debt off of the books it showed to the govt and to people that own Enron stock. once this debt didn't show up in Enron's reports, it created Enron appear rather more thriving than it really was. In Dec 2000, Enron claimed to own tripled its profits in 2 years.

In August 2001, Enron vp Sherron Watkins sent associate degree anonymous letter to the CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay, describing accounting ways that she felt could lead on Enron to "implode during a wave of accounting scandals." conjointly in August, CEO Kenneth Lay sent e-mails to his workers language that he expected Enron stock costs to travel up. Meanwhile, he sold-out off his own stock in Enron.

On Gregorian calendar month twenty second, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) declared that Enron was underneath investigation. On November eighth, Enron aforementioned that it's immoderate earnings for the past four years by $586 million which it owed over $6 billion in debt by next year.

With these announcements, Enron's stock worth took a dive. This drop triggered bound agreements with investors that created it necessary for Enron to repay their cash straightaway. once Enron couldn't return up with the money to repay its creditors, it declared for Chapter eleven bankruptcy.

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