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FIN 46, Consolidation of Variable Interest Entities, was an interpretation of United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (U.S. GAAP) published on January 17, 2003 by the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) [1] that made it more difficult to remove assets and liabilities from a company's balance sheet if the company retained an economic exposure to the assets and ...
Special-purpose entities were created to mask significant liabilities from Enron's financial statements. These entities made Enron seem more profitable than it was, and created a dangerous spiral in which, each quarter, corporate officers would have to perform more and more financial deception to create the illusion of billions of dollars in ...
A public company with a financial interest in such entities may be subject to certain financial reporting requirements. VIEs gained notoriety in the early 2000's due to their role in the Enron scandal, where the company used special-purpose entities to hide mounting losses from investors.
In the long history of financial frauds, Enron ranks near the top of the list, with the once high-flying energy trading company suddenly unraveling in a web of lies and accounting sleight-of-hand.
An Enron manual of ethics from July 2000, about a year before the company collapsed. Enron's complex financial statements were confusing to shareholders and analysts. [1]: 6 [10] When speculative business ventures proved disastrous, it used unethical practices to use accounting limitations to misrepresent earnings and modify the balance sheet to indicate favorable performance.
Enron may be one of the more infamous, but it's just one of many examples of financial chicanery in recent corporate history -- Computer Associates, MicroStrategy, Satyam, and WorldCom are all ...
The Enron case is possibly the most famous example of a company using SPEs to achieve the latter goal. [citation needed] Regulatory reasons: A special-purpose entity can sometimes be set up within an orphan structure to circumvent regulatory restrictions, such as regulations relating to nationality of ownership of specific assets. [citation needed]
The post-Enron rules of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which require some measure of independence of a special purpose entity from the operating company, and genuine economic substance to the transaction in which the SPE is a party, made it difficult or impossible to structure a synthetic lease SPE, so synthetic leases have ...