Enron Corporation: Corporate Fraud and Corruption

Enron Corporation, a major billion dollar company, was thriving at its highest level back in the year of 2000. Enron employed approximately 22,000 associates and was named “America’s most innovative company” by Fortune. However, under all of the bliss, revealed was a substantial amount of corporate fraud and corruption. The Enron scandal involved both illegal and unethical activity. Enron’s executive chose deception of the stakeholders and short-term financial gains for themselves. They were willing to destroy their personal and business reputations, as well as their social standings. The reason for this paper is to show that Enron valued making money above everything else, which lead to unethical behavior. Enron executives were motivated by greed of money, arrogance, pride, and self-interest. The executives of Enron pushed everyone to do whatever they had to do to make money or to make it appear as if money was being made. They were overly confident of their distorted perceptions and when challenged regarding the accurateness of the numbers they would retaliate against the accusers. Ken Lay the chairman of Enron was very greedy; it was money that motivated him, this caused him to ignore any complaints. When two traders were betting on the oil markets, resulting in high profits, Louis Borget was found to be diverting money into an offshore account. Lay ignored the negative feedback thereby, diminishing the capacity for ethical awareness encouraging them to continue, because it was making the company millions. However, once discovered they had actually gambled away Enron’s reserve they were fired. The greed, dishonesty, arrogance, selfishness, hypocrisy, disrespects and injustice that characterized top Enron executives’ intentions discloses their culpable motives and the corrupting workplace culture they created (Sennett 1998). The executives of Enron used political lobbying to affect deregulation by eliminating any governmental feedback of