The Enron Implosion and the Loss of Respect for the Accounting Professi

The Enron Implosion and the Loss of Respect for the Accounting Profession 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. In 1985, after federal deregulation of natural gas pipelines, Enron was born from the merger of Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, a Nebraska pipeline company. In the process of the merger, Enron incurred a lot of debt and, as the result of deregulation, no longer had exclusive rights to its pipelines. In order to survive, the company had to come up with a new and innovative business strategy to generate profits and cash flow. Kenneth Lay, CEO, hired McKinsey & Co. to assist in developing Enron’s business strategy. It assigned Jeffrey Skilling to the task. Skilling, who had a background in banking and asset and liability management, proposed a revolutionary solution to Enron’s credit, cash, and profit worries in the gas pipeline business: create a â€Å"gas bank† in which Enron would buy gas from a network of suppliers and sell it to a network of consumers, contractually guaranteeing both the supply and the price, charging fees for the transactions and assuming the associated risks. Thanks to the young consultant, the company created both a new product and a new paradigm for the industry—the energy derivative. Lay was so impressed with Skilling’s ... ... excellence stand in satirical contrast to allegations now being made public. Personally, I had referred several of our best and brightest accounting, finance and MBA graduates to Enron, hoping they could gain valuable experience from seeing things done right. These included a very bright training consultant who had lost her job in 2000 with a Houston consulting firm as a result of a reduction in force. She has lost her second job in 18 months through no fault of her own. Other former students still hanging on at Enron face an uncertain future as the company fights for survival. The old saying goes, â€Å"Lessons learned hard are learned best.† Some former Enron employees are embittered by the way they have been treated by the company that was once â€Å"the best in the business.† Others disagree. In the words of one of my former students who is still hanging on: â€Å"Just for the record, my time and experience at Enron have been nothing short of fantastic. I could not have asked for a better place to be or better people to work with. Please, though, remember this: Never take customer and employee confidence for granted. That confidence is easy to lose and tough—to impossible—to regain.†