“Every business lies about its ethics” Enron suffered a horrible loss because of their lack of ethics. Enron was a fast growing American energy, commodities, and services company based in Houston, Texas. The company’s worth was $70 billion. Enron was founded in 1985 but then in 2001 they were finally caught by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for knowingly manipulating accounting rules and masking the enormous losses and liabilities of the company. When a company does not establish rules of ethics that company like Enron will no more be in business. If Enron were to play by the rules their company would have still been in business and so would have Arthur Andersen. Enron lied about being ethical we could tell by the profits that Enron was making within a small span of time. Once the company Enron knew that they had made committed too much fraud they tried to cover it up with bringing Arthur Andersen, one of the big five accounting firms in the world. Enron convinced Arthur Andersen to money launder their money but since their profit margins were too high the SEC became very suspicious of this amount of money Enron was profiting. In the business world no one is forced into committing these crimes; Arthur Andersen had the choice to decline the offer from Enron to help them with money laundering but because they had no ethics they joined alliances with Enron. Once Enron fell apart they brought Arthur Andersen down too. Enron went bankrupt because of all the dues and imprisonment of the CEOs and Arthur Andersen was destroyed with the bad reputation that no company wanted them to do check their books.
Corporations find ethics to be a drain on profits; but every corporation claims to promote strong business ethics. Businesses promote that they are truly ethical but how can we believe and trust big time companies when their fraud crime scandals were announced to the business world. Most of the big companies say that they are ethical but in reality there aren’t from what we see on the Forbes website most of the world’s top ethical companies are not the very big ones makes tons and tons of money every year. If we were to trust a company I’d say it would have to be a small one because all the big companies get away with almost anything just like Enron did for 12 years. For example Wells Fargo a well known bank and is one of the largest banks in the United States though it is not on the list and why is that because they created thousands of phony accounts to be able to make a profit and meet their margins. These phony accounts were opened up in several of different customers accounts without them noticing. This was a very unethical action that Wells Fargo employees did, I see it that in this world to more about making profit then having ethics.
Works Cited
That’s exactly what happened to Wells Fargo customers nationwide. “5,300 Wells Fargo Employees Fired over 2 Million Phony Accounts.” CNNMoney, Cable News Network.
Kauflin, Jeff. “The World’s Most Ethical Companies 2017.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 14 Mar. 2017.
Investopedia. “5 Most Publicized Ethics Violations By CEOs.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 5 Feb. 2013.
Tribune, Chicago. “Ties to Enron Blinded Andersen.” Chicagotribune.com, 12 July 2008,
Rowan Counterintuitive 
Intern, you’re glossing over SO many important details of your Enron story that, if you paused long enough to give them a good look, you’d find it very hard to fit your argument into 1000 words.
First, you claim that Enron was worth 80 billion dollars, but you don’t offer any way to evaluate that claim. (For example, homes that worth 4 million dollars before the housing crash of 2009 eventually sold for a few hundred thousand. Their “worth” was entirely imaginary and based on a temporary fever in real estate pricing.) What was Enron’s real worth? Was it all a product of their creative bookkeeping? Or did it have some actual underlying value?
You say that eventually the company’s “enormous losses and liabilities” were exposed in the scandal that befell them. So, where did the losses come from? Was the company enormously profitable before its fall? Or were those huge profits and valuations merely invented lies told to shareholders to prop up the company’s stock value? In other words: was Enron a well-run, profitable, highly valuable company that suffered a scandal that destroyed it? Or was Enron a marginally successful company that created fake profits and fake value that made its stock very valuable, then continued to lie about itself when the stock popularity created more greed and opportunity? Maybe the scandal about Enron didn’t kill a profitable company; it merely exposed a company that wasn’t valuable in the first place.
The scandal at Andersen is even more egregious. The sole purpose of an accounting firm is to audit for truth and accuracy. It makes the story a company tells about itself credible. Investors know better than to believe the CEO of an energy company; but they don’t expect to be lied to by an independent auditor. (The same problem occurred in 2009 also. Auditors fell all over themselves to be hired by banks to tell the biggest lies possible about the quality of their investment portfolios. They knew that lying earned fees.)
PLEASE ask a knowledgeable friend to read your work before you ask me to read it, TheIntern. Sentences like this one that make no sense at all are SO damaging to your own argument that they would sink any essay.
There must be a simple error here that sabotages your meaning. You can’t see it because you know what you mean, but anyone unfamiliar with your essay would immediately see the problem. This is just one of MANY such examples in your two paragraphs that someone else would have caught and asked you to repair.
Is this helpful, Intern?
I would appreciate your response.
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