Enron scandal, series of events that resulted in the bankruptcy of the U.S. energy, commodities, and services company Enron Corporation and the dissolution of Arthur Andersen LLP, which had been one of the largest auditing and accounting companies in the world. The collapse of Enron, which held more than $60 billion in assets, involved one of the biggest bankruptcy filings in the history of the United States, and it generated much debate as well as legislation designed to improve accounting standards and practices, with long-lasting repercussions in the financial world.

Former Enron employees sitting with their belongings after layoffs by the bankrupt energy-trading company. David J. Phillip/AP

Enron was founded in 1985 by Kenneth Lay in the merger of two natural-gas-transmission companies, Houston Natural Gas Corporation and InterNorth, Inc.; the merged company, HNG InterNorth, was renamed Enron in 1986. After the U.S. Congress adopted a series of laws to deregulate the sale of natural gas in the early 1990s, the company lost its exclusive right to operate its pipelines. With the help of Jeffrey Skilling, who was initially a consultant and later became the company’s chief operating officer, Enron transformed itself into a trader of energy derivative contracts, acting as an intermediary between natural-gas producers and their customers. The trades allowed the producers to mitigate the risk of energy-price fluctuations by fixing the selling price of their products through a contract negotiated by Enron for a fee. Under Skilling’s leadership, Enron soon dominated the market for natural-gas contracts, and the company started to generate huge profits on its trades.

Skilling also gradually changed the culture of the company to emphasize aggressive trading. He hired top candidates from MBA programs around the country and created an intensely competitive environment within the company, in which the focus was increasingly on closing as many cash-generating trades as possible in the shortest amount of time. One of his brightest recruits was Andrew Fastow, who quickly rose through the ranks to become Enron’s chief financial officer. Fastow oversaw the financing of the company through investments in increasingly complex instruments, while Skilling oversaw the building of its vast trading operation.

The bull market of the 1990s helped to fuel Enron’s ambitions and contributed to its rapid growth. There were deals to be made everywhere, and the company was ready to create a market for anything that anyone was willing to trade. It thus traded derivative contracts for a wide variety of commodities—including electricity, coal, paper, and steel—and even for the weather. An online trading division, Enron Online, was launched during the dot-com boom, and the company invested in building a broadband telecommunications network to facilitate high-speed trading.

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As the boom years came to an end and as Enron faced increased competition in the energy-trading business, the company’s profits shrank rapidly. Under pressure from shareholders, company executives began to rely on dubious accounting practices, including a technique known as “mark-to-market accounting,” to hide the troubles. Mark-to-market accounting allowed the company to write unrealized future gains from some trading contracts into current income statements, thus giving the illusion of higher current profits. Furthermore, the troubled operations of the company were transferred to so-called special purpose entities (SPEs), which are essentially limited partnerships created with outside parties. Although many companies distributed assets to SPEs, Enron abused the practice by using SPEs as dump sites for its troubled assets. Transferring those assets to SPEs meant that they were kept off Enron’s books, making its losses look less severe than they really were. Ironically, some of those SPEs were run by Fastow himself. Throughout these years, Arthur Andersen served not only as Enron’s auditor but also as a consultant for the company.

The severity of the situation began to become apparent in mid-2001 as a number of analysts began to dig into the details of Enron’s publicly released financial statements. An internal investigation was initiated following a memorandum from a company vice president, and soon the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was investigating the transactions between Enron and Fastow’s SPEs.

As the details of the accounting frauds emerged, the stock price of the company plummeted from a high of $90 per share in mid-2000 to less than $1 by the end of November 2001, taking with it the value of Enron employees’ 401(k) pensions, which were mainly tied to the company stock. Lay and Skilling resigned, and Fastow was fired two days after the SEC investigation started.

On December 2, 2001, Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Many Enron executives were indicted on a variety of charges and were later sentenced to prison. Arthur Andersen came under intense scrutiny and eventually lost a majority of its clients. The damage to its reputation was so severe that it was forced to dissolve itself. In addition to federal lawsuits, hundreds of civil suits were filed by shareholders against both Enron and Andersen.

Enron scandal Joseph Berardino, then CEO of Arthur Andersen, testifying during a congressional hearing on the Enron scandal, 2002. Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Alamy

The scandal resulted in a wave of new regulations and legislation designed to increase the accuracy of financial reporting for publicly traded companies. The most important of those measures, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), imposed harsh penalties for destroying, altering, or fabricating financial records. The act also prohibited auditing firms from doing any concurrent consulting business for the same clients.