Unit 2 Discussion board Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Unit 2 Discussion board - Essay Example In this assignment, I am going to discuss about the episode of Enron Company and how their leadership used power to commit one of the heinous corporate crimes in the history of the world besides discussing some of the ethical lapses being committed by the organizational of Enron as well as political leadership of the United States of America. The ENRON scandal started as an accounting scandal however behind there is a whole story of power corruption and misuse of resources and powers to conceal and misrepresent the facts. It was discovered that irregular accounting practices which can easily be characterized as fraud were adopted in order to cover up the declining performance of Enron throughout the 1990’s decade. The major players involved in this whole fraudulent activity included not only the top management of the Enron specially Mr. Kenneth Lay, the CEO of the company and Mr. Jeffery Skilling but major role was also played by Enron’s auditors i.e. Arthur Anderson. The creative accounting behind this whole episode was crafted by opening special purpose entities or limited partnerships which Enron controlled. Resultantly all debts and losses that it suffered were transferred to these SPEs and were not appeared on the financial statements of the Enron. With the help of these SPEs Enron not only got the fre edom to move the currency besides having full anonymity which basically helped them to hide the losses it suffered by dumping them into the financial statements of these Special Purpose Entities Apart from being the involvement of the top executives of the company there were reports which suggested the involvement of the Clinton administration during the 1990s era. (Smith, 2002). Not only the involvement of ENRON into concealing the facts, it was also believed that ENRON executives exceeded their original mandate to involve the company into Political affairs even