EN 112
Research Paper
Final draft: Accounting and Ethics
ENRON and ACCOUNTING
It is the duty of top management in a corporation to ensure that employees are behaving ethically by encouraging, rewarding, enforcing, and leading by example in ethical behavior. According to Robert Lussier, in his book Management Fundamentals, "Ethics are the standards of right and wrong that influence behavior." (61). Ethical behavior pays, because society regards it highly, and besides that, it is in line with the Law; such that in a corporation if you are about to do something and you are not to sure as to whether it is legal or not, normally if it is ethical then it is most likely to be legal.
Too often people act out of self interest, and forget all other stakeholders when they take any actions representing the corporation, thus many Americans have lost trust in top managers. In one instance ethical behavior was totally ignored, and this resulted in catastrophic events taking place. Thousands of people lost their jobs, security, savings, investments, and some even lost or took their own lives. Lussier reports that "Arthur Anderson, an accounting firm lost many of its clients and had to sell parts of its business as a result of unethical behavior during its business ventures with Enron"(61). At this point unethical behavior at Enron had affected only one accounting firm. The basis of my research is to show how unethical behavior at Enron had an effect on the accounting profession as a whole.
Enron and it's over ambition and greed is the sad story of what happened to corporate America, and how its actions in turn affected the accounting profession. In the story of the greatest bankruptcy in the history of America, a lot of bizarre accounting tactics ...