Enron Business Research Ethics

Business Research Ethics

The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) authorizes a number of businesses or provides businesses with numerous amounts of details and information on fines or penalties if they breach exact guidelines. They are out into place to protect the consumer and these rules and guidelines have gotten more stringent as the years have progressed. This paper gives a bit of history on the company Enron and the unethical behavior that was involved, then goes into the parties that were affected by this unethical behavior, what affect this behavior had on Enron, and finally, determining if there was a way to avoid or resolve the unethical behavior.

Description of Unethical Behavior

Enron started as a merger of two Hous¬ton pipeline com¬pa¬nies in 1985. While Enron faced a num-ber of finan¬cially dif¬fi¬cult years, the com¬pany man¬aged to sur¬vive. Throughout the years, Enron’s con¬tracts became increas¬ingly diverse and sig¬nif¬i¬cantly more com¬plex. As Enron’s prod¬ucts and ser¬vices evolved, so did the company’s culture. The Har¬vard Busi¬ness Review Case Study: Enron’s Trans¬for¬ma¬tion (Bartlett and Glin¬ska, 2001) con¬tains employee quo¬ta¬tions such as “… you were expected to per¬form to a stan¬dard that was con¬tin¬u¬ally being raised …”, “the only thing that mat¬tered was adding value”, or “… it was all about an atmosphere of delib¬er¬ately break¬ing the rules …” (Bartlett and Glin¬ska, 2001). Enron crossed the threshold into a deceiv¬ing web of part¬ner¬ships and employed increas¬ingly ques¬tion¬able account¬ing meth¬ods to main¬tain its investment-grade sta¬tus. In August of 2001, Jef¬fery Skilling resigned as Pres¬i¬dent and CEO of Enron and sold shares of his com¬pany stock total¬ing $66 mil¬lion dol¬lars. If Enron fostered an environment that was for ethical behavior and trained its executives to investigate information and actually report this behavior then this corporation could have avoided a tragedy. Instead, poor business researching methods resulted in many individuals losing their life-savings, having their identities compromised, and society as a whole not having confidence in the financial market.

Injured Parties

The unethical behavior of Enron had a major effect on many injured parties. Employees, their families, corporate shareholders, investors, customers, banks, the financial market, and their business suppliers, all were affected by the Enron ethical implosion. Everyone involved lost incomes; some lost their sole source of income to support their families and their retirements. Suppliers lost a major contract that could possibly have caused them to go under. The financial world, or in this instance the Security Exchange Commission, set certain regulations just for