Ethics Week 3

Chapter 2

Question 3.

Is there anything else that can be done to curtail/reduce this sort of egregious/bad business behaviour other than legislation?

- auditor and accountants should not team up, must work separately

- higher fine

- auditors need to have more training and knowledge on what is wrong and what is right

- make people more aware of the consequences of doing this bad business behaviour (include real life examples)

Case Study.

ENRON

6. What aspects and why did Enron governance system failed to work properly?

By the fall of 2000, Enron was starting to crumble under its own weight. CEO Jeffrey Skilling had a way of hiding the financial losses of the trading business and other operations of the company; it was called mark-to-market accounting. This is used in the trading of securities, when you determine what the actual value of the security is at the moment. This can work well for securities, but it can be disastrous for other businesses.

In Enron's case, the company would build an asset, such as a power plant, and immediately claim the projected profit on its books, even though it hadn't made one dime from it. If the revenue from the power plant was less than the projected amount, instead of taking the loss, the company would then transfer these assets to an off-the-books corporation, where the loss would go unreported. This type of accounting created the attitude that the company did not need profits, and that, by using the mark-to-market method, Enron could basically write off any loss without hurting the company's bottom line.

The mark-to-market practice led to schemes that were designed to hide the losses and make the company appear to be more profitable than it really was. In order to cope with the mounting losses, Andrew Fastow, a rising star who was promoted to CFO in 1998, came up with a devious plan to make the company appear to be in great shape, despite the fact that many of its subsidiaries were losing money. That scheme was...