Sherron Watkins—Revelations of a Letter

Who Is Sherron Watkins? Sherron Watkins gained fame as the so-called “whistle-blower” in the Enron accounting scandal. “Enron hid billions of dollars in debts and operating losses inside private partnerships and dizzyingly complex accousnting schemes that were intended to pump up the buzz about the company and support its inflated stock price.” Watkins wrote two letters, one anonymously, to Enron’s chairman, Kenneth Lay. In those letters she “exposed top officials—perhaps including Lay himself—who for months had been trying to hide a mountain of debt, and started a chain reaction of events that brought down the company.”

Watkins had a “flair for numbers” and the training and expertise to recognize a “funny accounting scheme.” She received an accounting degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1981 and a master’s degree in accounting in 1982, after which she went to work for Arthur Andersen’s Houston office. Watkins transferred to Andersen’s New York City office and then subsequently returned to Houston in the early 1990s to work for Enron. Eight years after joining Enron, Watkins had risen to the position of vice president for corporate development. According to one retrospective account of the Enron scandal, Watkins “understood that something very bad was going on, something everyone else seemed to think was perfectly okay, and that public revelation would be disastrous.” Somehow Watkins “was able to escape the groupthink that ensnared her colleagues.” Nonetheless, she worried about the future—apparently both Enron’s and her own. As she wrote in a six-page letter to Ken Lay, “I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals. My eight years of Enron work history will be worth nothing on my résumé, the business world will consider the past successes as nothing but an elaborate