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What could good corporate governance have done for Enron?

Corporate governance is policies and laws that affect the way a company such as Enron is run.
The Enron scam was a scam that used mark to market pricing. Enron also hampered with the financial accounting statement by hiding information and not showing the true status of the company.
In this way, Good corporate governance should have had a tighter control over the use of accounting policies. Also, anticipating profits (that Enron did) is just an estimate and the determinants of such as estimate is very subjective.
In Enron, the business leaders were too concerned about inflating the share prices and showing a pretty picture of the company’s financial position. The leaders of Enron should have had more moral grounding in understanding that such behaviour would have repercussions. Good corporate governance could have prevented this greed from building up.
When the company anticipated their downward slope, Jeff Skilling did not take action to acknowledge his mistake and instead swept the matter under the carpet. Instead of this corporate governance would have made sure that such behaviour would strictly not be allowed.
Tighter laws and stricter policies would have ensured that the scandal did not take place to such a large extent. Better accounting policies that ensured that only sales actually realised should be accounted for. Laws such as more transparency about the running and operations of companies would actually mean the Enron would be more careful about their operations since their actions were under the public eye. Therefore, Good corporate governance could have actually prevented all the damage that Enron caused to the society.

Sample Answer: * Prevent the use of mark to market accounting. * Look after stockholder interest by reviewing stock price – not inflate the price *

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