Enron: A Disaster Years in the Making
Enron's collapse was the result of unethical practices; alas, such practices had a long, ignominious presence.
The Enron story begins with CEO Kenneth Lay, who in 1986 combined his Houston Natural Gas company with several other entities. Until 1996, Enron primarily sold natural gas. Yet, in a sign of trouble to come, in 1987 Lay overlooked evidence of financial misdeeds in the company’s Valhalla, NY unit as executives Louis Borget and Thomas Mastroeni greatly inflated profits while embezzling funds.
With this precedent, Enron’s corruption arguably received a further boost the following year with the arrival of Jeffrey Skilling. Skilling had a reputation for painting a picture of robust profits without regard to underlying conditions. One of Skilling’s prerogatives as Enron president was an insistence on using “mark-to-market” accounting, utilizing both a bevy of off-book accounts in addition to documenting anticipated profits as present in the current fiscal year.
Lay continued to turn a blind eye; after all, Enron was turning into a behemoth by the mid-Nineties and a fresh influx of money was continually needed for the company’s seemingly endless diversification plans.
By 1996, deregulation of the oil and gas industries had allowed Enron to more heavily spend in these markets, buying companies in addition to serving as a major supplier.
Investors took notice. Enron stock began its inexorable climb in the latter half of the Nineties. With diversification often comes debt, but rather than keep this debt on the BOOKS and allow it to be written off over time, by now Skilling and Lay had begun creating partnerships such as Chewco Investments, allowing it to keep its multi-million dollar debt off the ledgers shown to current and potential investors. In what would turn out to be another fated decision, Enron also presented improper ledgers to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Enron had begun to pursue mammoth growth for its own sake; this required the appearance of a thriving corporation. By December of 2000, it claimed triple profits in three years. It all seemed plausible. After all, Enron was investing heavily in other markets, such as the nascent Internet. It had aired an ad in the 1997 Super Bowl touting its strengths while asking consumers to support increased deregulation.
2001 ended in events that no one—most of all, it seems, Lay and Skilling—could have foreseen. In March, Fortune magazine columnist Bethany McLean pondered aloud whether Enron was overpriced. The discrepancies McLean unearthed raised eyebrows in the financial community - all the more so when Fastow admitted that the firm used a labyrinthine set of trading BOOKS—over 1200—and refused to elaborate further. Skilling, for his part, claimed McLean’s reporting was “unethical,” and directed an obscenity at another financial reporter in an April conference call when asked about Enron’s accounting practices. Such defensiveness unsettled investors.
Enron vice president Sherron Watkins wrote anonymously to Lay in August, warning that its accounting methods may well “implode” in scandal. Amidst this growing storm, in an email to his employees, Lay stated that Enron’s stock would continue to climb. However, like Skilling, he privately sold off his own stock throughout 2001.
With the October 22 SEC announcement that it would be investigating Enron’s partnerships and accounting practices, Enron stock began to fall. Lay appealed for help from Alan Greenspan and others. Having seen the evidence, no governmental assistance was forthcoming.
On November 8th, Enron at last admitted it had overstated earnings over the previous four years by $586 million and that it owed over $6 billion in debt. On December 2, Enron filed for bankruptcy protection. Creditors and ex-employees alike would have to wait years to collect on compensations due.
Some argue that the Enron accounting scandal has receded into history with the 2006 trials of Lay, Skilling and others. While “the smartest guys in the room” were found guilty of securities and wire fraud, Enron lingers in the national imagination. Like “Watergate,” it has become a metaphor for malfeasance and outright lying in the face of scrutiny.
However, it should be read equally as a cautionary tale of what happens when a corporation lets unethical business practices consume not only accounting practices but it’s very culture.