Word: enronization
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Most troubling of all, what about when enough ambition becomes way too much? Grand dreams unmoored from morals are the stuff of tyrants--or at least of Enron. The 16-hour workday filled with high stress and at-the-desk meals is the stuff of burnout and heart attacks. Even among kids, too much ambition quickly starts to do real harm. In a just completed study, anthropologist Peter Demerath of Ohio State University surveyed 600 students at a high-achieving high school where most of the kids are triple-booked with advanced-placement courses, sports and after-school jobs. About...
Tell that "safe and secure" part to the folks at Enron, who lost $1 billion in their 401(k)s. Or WorldCom employees, who also lost $1 billion. Or Kmart employees, who lost at least $100 million. Welcome to the 21st century version of Studebaker...
...this be? Thanks to the way Congress writes the rules, pension accounting has a lot in common with Enron accounting, but with one exception: it's perfectly legal. By adjusting the arcane formulas used to calculate pension assets and obligations, corporate accountants can turn a drastically underfunded system into a financially healthy one, even inflate a company's profits and push up its stock price. Ethan Kra, chief actuary of Mercer Human Resources Consulting, once put it this way: "If you used the same accounting for the operations side [of a corporation] that is used on pension funds, you would...
...investors are wondering how so many gatekeepers, including auditors at the accounting firm Grant Thornton and officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), missed the company's alleged book cooking so soon after the scandals of Enron, Worldcom and others. "Everybody had a chance to look them over," says Bill Harris, a forensic accountant at the business-services firm CBIZ. "Four hundred thirty million dollars is an awful big number to hide." Those who have dealt with Refco say there was reason to be careful. In 1999 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission levied $7 million in fines against Refco...
...total number of proposals submitted by shareholders hit an all-time high “in the wake of Enron and the other scandals,” says Patrick McGurn, executive vice president and special counsel at Institutional Shareholder Services...