"Who's Accountable?"

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,193520,00.html

Enron? Shmenron!

Trying to blame the Enron debacle on the GOP is nonsense.

Enron is a creature of the Clinton Era of lies and corruption. Enron, like the Clintons, manufactured nothing but deceit, and like the Clintons, sold that deceit to the USA public at a great cost.

The GOP allowed Enron to die a natural death. This was the right thing to do!

The Enron disaster is a bastard child of the party of lies, the Democrats, and the Auditing profession who have lost their way! Hopefully Accountants will change their ways and recover by getting back to their roots of protecting investors. The Democrats won't change.

That's great. Just great.

AS a gun owning CPA, now I'm BOTH an evil "assault rifle owner," sure to be a criminal one day, and a professional who has "lost his way, sure to go out and cheat shareholders blind.

You better just shoot me now, cuz I'm just too dangerous to be left alive.

I THINK I know what you mean, but come on, Goad.

Don't blame a whole group of people for the illegal (or at least possibly unethical) actions of a few individuals.

The Enron fiasco is an indictment of the corruption of Enron management. The idiot democrats try to tar Bush with the Enron brush, but it's really specious, much like their insistence that cutting taxes CASUSED the the recession [whacko]

The 79 highest executive who all cashed out in January 2001-summer 2001 should all do time.  If they knew the ship was sinking but kept their mouths shut, then they are culpable.  The accounting firm that played ball with the managers should be fined, the accountants in charge should be stripped of their professional credentials and jailed.

In my opinion the following are those 'most' accountable:
1)  The Enron board
2)  The Enron officers
3)  The audit firm of Arthur Anderson & Co.
4)  The SEC
5)  Enron's investment bankers
6)  Enron's primary market makers
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7)  Enron's in-house counsel
8)  Enron's primary ouside counsel


(Sorry garandman but even after considering your CPA creds as well as your old but reliable weapon you finished far below the cut.)

7.  The stock analyasts that are supposed to watch Enron.

The problem was the companies the analysts work for had big interests in Enron, and so they didn't downgrade the stock in the face of the mounting evidence until way after it was goner.

The stock was a "buy" all the way to the toilet!

Hello garandman:

The Time article discloses in lay terms that the Enron bankruptcy began with a highly questionable bargain whereby one party contributes hundreds of millions in real US dollars and Enron contributes: Enron shares!

I would ask for suckers, ahem, I mean investors to give me the same deal.

garandman, You are a staunch supporter of the Constitution and can do no wrong. The accounting profession needs more like you.

However, Enron balance sheet errors is a breakdown of a traditional function of auditing and is a wake up call that more, who knows how many more, balance sheet surprises are out there?

The damage of the Clinton Era continues.

Oh, goody, an accounting question!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Good list, but allow me to make a few mods.

Switch #1 and #2 in order of culpability. The Board has LITTLE involvement in day to day operations, and SCANT little chance of knowing anything the Officers were trying to conceal. The Board gets most of its info from the Fianacial Statements in the Annual Report, which are issued by the CPA's. That of course occurred AFTER the fact of enron's collapse. So the Board can be cut a little slack, at least compared to the Officers.

#3 is spot on. But I CAN tell you this - as someone who has worked BOTH sides of the Auditor / Client relationship, if I wanted to conceal something in the financials, it would be childs play to do so in a fashion that the auditors would NEVER find it

#4 Take the SEC off the list completely. They won't know ANYTHING until the 10K is filed - which happened only weeks before Enron's collapse became public knowledge. I find it HIGHLY improbable the SEC is part of teh collusion here.

#5 and #6 are fine also.

G. Man, I'm an old guy with old and outmoded beliefs.
I actually still believe in such idiotic principles as honor and integrity.
And I still actually believe in "FIDUCIARY RESPONSIBILITY."

If the board did not know they did not choose to know.  Even more firm - they chose not to know.  Where was the audit committe of the board ?  Make-up virtually had to be members outside Enron.
The board had the fidicuary responsibility to know.
In my mind they remain firmly in first place.

Any slack that I might have given the outside auditors - and I would have given them a good bit - is null and void by their recent actions.
A.A. has made a business decision that destroying documents and facing the music the destruction generates is less costly to them than having the documents see the light of day. One can only wonder what was contained in those documents that drove such a decision.

The SEC......maybe another time.

Not a THING wrong with that.



I see your point. I was thinking more in the way things do work, NOT the way they SHOULD work.

Still, just like the outside auditors, the officers could fairly easily conceal MOST ANYTHING from teh Board. Cna't speak for Enron, but MANY Boards are highly honorary and detached from the operations of teh Company. That's just the way it is.



You right. I think the A.A. guys are gonna become AA guys, if you knows what I means.

Let 'em fry, I say. Let those individuals become the object lesson for the entire industry. Which BTW is actually a fairly scrupulous bunch of nerds (myself included)

Allowing the dead Enron to die was the right thing to do.

I believe the top execs at Enron came up with a way to cook their books. Arthur Anderson helped the company cook them. On Oct.12 Anderson management directed their employees to begin destroying docs.

Take a look at the stock history for Enron around Oct 12, 2001 and tell me what you see.

Some peope need to go to jail.

Wall Street analysts have to work with the data that Enron provides them, don't they?  Enron also gave a huge amount of business to investment banks all over Wall Street, so analysts were pressured by THEIR managers not to bite the hand that fed their firm.

Enron also blew smoke up the cracks of institutional investors, fooling people who ought to have known better.  Clinton-class liars, breath-taking scandal.

Have you heard the latest BS from Waxman?  He started demanding an investigation of wrongdoing by the Bush admin, because Enron had called the White House.  Now it turns out that Bush did jack to bail out Enron.  Waxman's response?  Now he's saying that Bush SHOULD have done something to avert Enron's meltdown, that he really dropped the ball on this [>:/]  Unbelievable.  

The fools on democraticunderground.com are somehow linking the Enron scandal with the Argentina collapse and 9/11-Afghanistan.  Too funny.

::putting on tin-foil hat::

This morning on CNN, a former SEC Chairman accused, "Wall Street bankers for cooking up this scheme. . . will probably take Arthur Anderson down."

The out-of-sight made huge bucks on this scam.
We don't know what money is.

Don't you mean Arthur Andersen, not Anderson. As to the destruction of documents, known as working papers, their destruction is an ongoing event that occurs all the time (housekeeping) in the business process. Now, if it was me, I do not think that I would have destroyed them because it was becoming more obvious that there were issues with the opinion that was submitted as to the assertion made by Enron's management in their financial statements. SOME people have the notion that the job of auditors is to determine if there is fraud involved in the reporting of financial information to users. That is not what auditors do. They provide an opinion as to the assertion submitted by Enron in their financials as compared to GAAP.
However, I do think that there are some problems with the situation and it is going to take time to sort things out. Everything will be set right, it is just going to take time and effort on the part of all involved.
The irony of all of this is that if a business fails through their own actions and/or fraud, the libs piss and moan..............if a business tanks because the government comes after them, well isn't that what the government is supposed to do to all of the big bad evil corporations. I love bitter irony.

The industry is generally scrupulous.

I've worked with A.A. as outside audit firm and found them to be excellent.

I understand the pressures not to lose a large audit client.  Those pressures are enermous.

Just to hazard a guess someone a good while ago cut a corner and then another......until finally there was complicity.

This thing really stinks.  People should go to jail.

We'll see.

No they do not.

BYU,
yours is the most optimistic statement I've read or heard since a man told me ...."Now 'if' I die... !"

MY argument regarding Enron and the accounting profession is that if accounting professionals create and follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Auditing Standards that fail to protect the investor then the house of cards we refer to as the world economy will collapse. My argument is that Enron presented to the world lies they called Income Statement and Balance Sheet and SOMEBODY was supposed say they aren't telling a truth. The problems of Enron appear systemic and the Clinton gang (who had the "watch") and/or Arthur Andersen is responsible. Not the GOP, who did the right thing.

Being another member of the accounting profession, with a backgroung in public accouting, I have seen how this situation may have occurred.  Generally, there are a lot of gray areas with the treatment of accounting transactions, and off balance sheet transactions are rife with these gray areas.  However, if a company wants to treat a transaction one way, and the accounting firm feels it would be better to be treated another way, the threat of losing that client generally results in a lot more leeway given to the client.  Money can make you justify a lot of things in your mind.

That is okay for ar15.com. This place, we, are easy. Usually. Sometimes.

But it is, well, criminal, isn't it? Sociopathic, even?  

Hardly respectible in respectable circles.

Substance over form, always. Basic undergraduate stuff.

Retaining your client........
Retaining your position.......
Not technically proper but real-life practical considerations.

Somehow I believe Enron "eventually" transcended both the technical and the practical.

I find it funny they spent about 2k bringing me out there late sept early oct for recruitment.. then fell off the earth..

I remember the stock was at 20 down from like 40.
I had no idea.

My reply verbatim from the last oncarnation of this topic--

You folks are missing a very basic fact in all of this. It's called Divide and Conquer. But hold on, it's not the us against them schtick I'm talking about. You folks all believe there is a difference between the Reps and the Dems. There is not. The political parties are one and the same.

Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft and their oil and intelligence buddies are in on this Enron scandal, but so are the Democracts of all flavors. This is how they keep winning the battles. Every once in a while, they let us think that we threw the old corrupt bastards out and put new angelic ones in. When in truth, we have just voted in more corrupt bastards and the raping and pillaging of the Constitution and BOR continues unabated.

And before you folks attempt to call me a Democrat lover or some other vile thing, let me lay it out for you. I believe in the Consitution and Bill of Rights. The rights contained therein are ABSOLUTE. Anyone who consciously and willfully infringes either of these is guilty of TREASON and should be shot, plain and simple. Now if there were a political party with this belief as a foundation, that would be my party.

The time is very near indeed when the true purpose of our beloved firearms will be our only salvation *outside of Divine intervention) from the coming death and enslavement.

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So in short, it's us who are responsible for not only electing these folks, but also for continuing to believe that putting new crooks in changes anything. Our founders gave us the answer to fix this morass, we just appear to be to domesticated to pursue that solution.

I feel really bad for the Enron employees that were heavily invested in Enron stock.  Many of these folks lost everything.

Arthur Anderson really needs to clean house.  There have been a few problems, including Sunbeam, that have indicated that their auditing services needed a tune up.  This enron thing is a much more serious matter, with much more money at stake.  If I worked there, I might just be concerned.

I hate to say this, but who is accountable.

The stock holders. No not the employees, but the ones who lost something when they were free to leave.

THE ENRON GOP ATTEMPT BY the DEMOCRAPS IS BULLSHIT.

ENRON was nothing then and is actually alot less then that now.

Benjamin