Enron 2u4o5d

Enron Financial Reporting Enron’s complex business model – reaching across many products, including physical assets and trading operations, and crossing national borders – stretched the limit of ing. Enron took full advantage of ing limitations in managing its earnings and balance sheet to portray a rosy picture of its performance 2 sets of issues proved especially problematic. First, its trading business involved complex long-term contracts. Current ing rules use the present value framework to record these transactions, requiring management to make forecasts of future earnings. This approach, known as mark-to-market ing, was central to Enron’s income recognition and resulted in its management making forecasts of energy prices and interest rates well into the future. Second, Enron relied extensively on structured finance transactions that involved setting up special purpose entities. These transactions shared ownership of specific cash flows and risks with outside investors and lenders. Traditional ing, which focuses on arms-length transactions between independent entities, faces challenges in dealing with such transactions. ing rule-makers have been debating appropriate ing rules for these transactions for several years. Meanwhile, mechanical conventions have been used to record these transactions, creating a divergence between economic realities and ing numbers. Trading Business and Mark-to-Market ing In Enron’s original natural gas business, the ing had been fairly straightforward: in each time period, the company listed actual costs of supplying the gas and actual revenues received from selling it. However, Enron’s trading business adopted mark-to-market ing, which meant that once a long-term contract was signed, the present value of the stream of future inflows under the contract was recognized as revenue and the present value of the expected costs of fulfilling the contract were expensed. Unrealized gains and losses in the market value of long-term contracts (that were not hedged) were then required to be reported later as part of annual earnings when they occurred.

Enron’s primary challenge in using mark-to-market ing was estimating the market value of the contracts, which in some cases ran as long as 20 years. Income was estimated as the present value of net future cash flows, even though in some cases there were serious questions about the viability of these contracts and their associated costs. For example, in July 2000 Enron signed a 20-year agreement with Blockbuster Video to introduce entertainment on demand to multiple U.S. cities by year-end. Enron would store the entertainment and encode and stream the entertainment over its global broadband network. Pilot projects in Portland, Seatlle and Salt Lake City were created to stream movies to a few dozen apartments from servers set up in the basement. Based on these pilot projects, Enron went ahead and recognized estimated p

Enron incorporated “mark-to-market ing” for the energy trading business in the mid-1990s and used it on an unprecedented scale for its trading transactions. Under markto-market rules, whenever companies have outstanding energy-related or other derivative contracts (either assets or liabilities) on their balance sheets at the end of a particular quarter, they must adjust them to fair market value, booking unrealized gains or losses to the income statement of the period. A difficulty with application of these rules in ing for long-term futures contracts in commodities such as gas is that there are often no quoted prices upon which to base valuations. Companies having these types of derivative instruments are free to develop and use discretionary valuation models based on their own assumptions and methods. The Financial ing Standards Board’s (FASB) emerging issues task force has debated the subject of how to value and disclose energy-related contracts for several years. It has been able to conclude only that a one-size-fits-all approach will not work and that to require companies to disclose all of the assumptions and estimates underlying earnings would produce disclosures that were so voluminous they would be of little value. For a company such as Enron, under continuous pressure to beat earnings estimates, it is possible that valuation estimates might have considerably overstated earnings. Furthermore, unrealized trading gains ed for slightly more than half of the company’s $1.41 billion reported pretax profit for 2000 and about one-third of its reported pretax profit for 1999.

“Mark-to-market” ing became acceptable and Skilling applied it to the energy trading business. “Under mark to market rules, whenever companies have outstanding energy-related or derivation contracts (either assets or liabilities) on their balance sheets at the end of a particular quarter, they must adjust them to fair market value, booking unrealized gains or losses to the income statement for the period;” however, long term future contracts for commodities such as gas are difficult to ascertain market values, typically no quoted prices are available. This leaves room for companies to develop its own valuation models as well as room for manipulation. With debt still visible, financial analysis’ rating for Enron were lower than the company desired. Andy Fastow, Enron’s CFO, led the company in the use of special purpose entities (SPEs) to increase the capital and improve Enron’s rating. SPEs are partnerships with an outside party that allow the company to increase its ROA and leverage without required reporting of debt on the company’s financial statements. Thus, Fastow was able to hide Enron’s debt through approximately 500 SPEs, including “troubled” hard assets such as overseas energy plants and broadband operations. These entities are required to have at last a 3% interest from an independent party to qualify for the off balance sheet requirement; if the interest requirement is not reached, the entity must be reported as a subsidiary to the parent company. Moreover, related party transactions hindered transparent financial statement. Risk for these entities was assumed by Enron and not the outside party, yet were not completely independent. Enron wasn't actually doing very well financially, but the executives illegally changed their financial records to make it look like they were doing great.

So everyone thought it was good, and people kept on buying shares, and share prices kept on rising. All the while, the executives of Enron were slowly selling off their shares at a high price, because only they knew that the reality was that the shares were worthless. The crime is called "Insider Trading". It's also what Martha Stewartwas arrested for.

They got caught, and went to jail. The share prices plummeted, and all of the shareholders lost their investment money. For many innocent Enron employees, their pensions were guaranteed in Enron stock, so when they share prices died, so did their pension funds. Thousands of innocent people lost huge amounts of money.

Enron evolved from a legitimate pipeline gas trader into what is known in business as a "black box" -an enterprise that reports but cannot its profits. Jeff Skilling, the company's leader, instituted "mark to market" ing, where projected profits from any of the company's deals were ed on the books as real, even if over time they turned out to be losses. So Enron appeared to be successful despite losing money, a fact carefully hidden from investors whose purchase of Enron stock provided the capital to keep the charade going. Other corporate entities were established by Enron to help disguise its deficits from Wall Street. With the collusion of a bribed ing firm and number of prominent banks, the deceit lasted until the collapse of the 1990s tech boom.

As bad as that fraud was, the worst part of the scandal occurred when Enron used its control of a West Coast electric company to extort billions of dollars from California by creating artificial blackouts. If the state did not pay Enron's outrageous rates, the power was shut off. Consequently, people were stuck in elevators, and cars crashed because traffic signals went dead. For a company to bring a state to its knees like that is one of the most despicable acts perpetrated in American business history. Disgraced CEO Kenneth Lay escaped punishment by dying before sentencing, but Jeff Skilling will rot in prison, a curious fate for a graduate of the prestigious Harvard Business School. The Enron scandal was a financial scandal that was revealed in late 2001. After a series of revelations involving irregular ing procedures bordering on fraud, perpetrated throughout the 1990s, involving Enron and its ing firm Arthur Andersen, it stood at the verge of undergoing the largest bankruptcy in history by mid-November 2001. A white knight rescue attempt by a similar, smaller energy company, Dynegy, was not viable. Enron filed for bankruptcy on December 2, 2001.

As the scandal was revealed, Enron shares dropped from over US$90.00 to just pennies. As Enron had been considered a blue chip stock, this was an unprecedented and disastrous event in the financial world. Enron's plunge occurred after it was revealed that much of its profits and revenue were the result of deals with special purpose entities (limited partnerships which it controlled). The result was that many of Enron's debts and the losses that it suffered were not reported in its financial statements.

In addition, the scandal caused the dissolution of Arthur Andersen, which at the time was one of the world's top five ing firms. The CEO and of the Board of Director's lied to the investors about the real worth of the company. The company was losing money, but numbers were fudeged, and details not given in an attempt to inflate the value of the stock. Then the CEO and others sold the inflated stock to make some quick money and let the bottom fall out for the rest. Employees at Enron were lied to, and they had all there life savings wiped out. No love loss for any of the bigwigs. May they rot in jail where they belong. Pretty much in simple the CEO's of Enron knew that things were going bad and hid the true figures from everyone, including their employees, and pretty much left them to hang while the

company went bankrupt. They had all sold their shares of the company before the crash and made out like bandits. It's America mang.