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Special-purpose entities were one of the main tools used by executives at Enron, in order to hide losses and fabricate earnings, resulting in the Enron scandal of 2001. They were also used to hide losses and overstate earnings by executives at Towers Financial Corporation , which declared bankruptcy in 1994.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Chanos is known for being an early spotter of trouble at Enron , betting against it and profiting while others got crushed. The company's reportable stock portfolio totaled $293 million in value ...
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 ...