Word: enronizing
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...That flair led Watkins last summer to conclude there was something rotten at Enron. The numbers didn't add up. A pair of letters that she wrote to Chairman Kenneth Lay exposed top officials--perhaps including Lay himself--who for months had been trying to hide a mountain of debt, and started a chain reaction of events that brought down the company. Watkins' letters, along with thousands of other documents, are now in the hands of congressional and criminal investigators who are probing how Enron, its pet-rock auditors at Andersen and a host of other supporting actors allowed...
...educators, Watkins grew up in nearby Tomball, where she worked the cash register at the family grocery store and began saving her money. By 1982, she'd picked up two accounting degrees in Austin and quickly found a job with Arthur Andersen. She eventually landed a job with Enron, Houston's red-hot energy trading firm, rising in eight years to vice president for corporate development. Her quick ascent surprised no one, says her husband Rick: "She always had a flair for numbers...
...Maybe you can only glimpse the soul of a company when it breaks open right before your eyes. But we know now, thanks to Watkins, that Enron hid billions of dollars in debts and operating losses inside private partnerships and dizzyingly complex accounting schemes that were intended to pump up the buzz about the company and support its inflated stock price. We also learned last week that executives at Andersen, the accounting giant that enabled Enron's every move, fretted about the arrangement but saw the chance to double their fees if they just kept their heads down...
...these characters tell their self-serving stories, the fall of Enron is the most revealing sort of failure. It is a failure of the old-fashioned idea that auditors, directors and stock analysts are supposed to put the interests of shareholders above their own thirst for fees. It is a failure of government: having greased nearly every campaigner's palm in Washington, Enron worked overtime to keep the regulators from looking too closely at a balance sheet gone bad. And it is a failure of character, especially inside Enron, where managers who knew something was badly wrong...
...About the only thing that didn't fail was Sherron Watkins' flair for numbers. In the sad tale of Enron's collapse, Watkins is the closest thing to a hero in sight. When she goes out for coffee, strangers stop to give her "attagirls" and ask for her autograph. She still goes to work each day at the company's headquarters in downtown Houston, where the tilted logo out front has yielded Enron a new nickname: the Crooked...