Word: lay
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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...
...news media, it is "Enron whistle-blower" Sherron Watkins, even though Watkins never really blew a whistle. A whistle-blower would have written that letter to the Houston Chronicle, and long before August; Watkins wrote it to Ken Lay, and warned him of potential whistle-blowers lurking among them. (She quotes one of them as lamenting, "We're such a crooked company...
...front of a bank of microphones, not yet. But because she wrote a letter to her boss, we know she knew, about the "Condor" and "Raptor" partnerships and the accounting and the doom Enron was facing. We know that in August she told them - her boss, Ken Lay, and then her friend at Arthur Andersen, who then told Andersen's head Enron auditor, David Duncan, who's now telling Congress. And so we know that they all knew...
...plenty pissed. "I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals," she wrote to Lay. "My 8 years of Enron work history will be worth nothing on my resume, the business world will consider the past successes as nothing but an elaborate accounting hoax." Accounting for the failed partnerships, she said, was "a bit like robbing the bank in one year and trying to pay it back 2 years later," and she just didn't think it could be done. "We are under too much scrutiny," she wrote, "and there are probably...
...Because while Sherron Wadkins certainly seems to have been a conscientious employee with a sharp eye for trouble, whistle-blowing isn't whistle-blowing if only Ken Lay and some Arthur Andersen partners - who probably didn't need the advice and certainly didn't follow it - heard the noise. Blowing the whistle on Enron's creative accounting, however, wasn't Wadkins' job. It was the job of the certified public accountants - the outside auditors - at Arthur Andersen...