...Eshon Howard Bus 339 Marketing Research Hard Body Research Plan Victor Olufeso Introduction The Hard Body Haulers is a local moving company that is not experiencing consistent growth in revenue. The company was founded in 2008 and is located in Cleveland, Ohio; one of the fastest shrinking cities in terms of population in the United States (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/39/3916000.html, 2006). This along with the high number of home foreclosures in the area indicates that people in the area are relocating to other dwellings. In contrast, the level of people unemployed in the area indicate that people do not have the discretionary resources available to them to hire a mover and are instead utilizing do it yourself alternatives (http://www.cleveland.com/datacentral/index.ssf, 2011). Moving costs are expensive to consumers in a recessive economy. Much of the cost of that the moving companies incur are fixed costs in the form of equipment such as vehicle maintenance, packaging supplies, and lifting equipment. Secondly, there is a high cost insurance and licensing requirements that every moving company must have in order to be in compliance with the State of Ohio (http://www.puco.ohio.gov/puco/, 2011). The availability of the moving company can also increase the costs considering that most moving companies are busiest on the last ten days of the month (Cohn, 2010). Finally, moving can be a very time consuming process. So moving companies generally charge on an hourly...
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...15 2014 Amarjit Singh Business Research Ethics The largest unethical story in business of my era would have to be the collapse of the energy company Enron. This scandal was based on insider trading, money laundry, and unethical practice of business accounting. Enron not only had unethical business practices going on they were illegal as well. The key people involved in this scandal were Jeff Skilling, Ken Lay, Ben Glisan, and Andrew Fastow. Unethical accounting based on false profit’s showed Enron was profits into the 100’s of billions of dollars that never existed because of the accounting practices they were using. This all became a issue when Enron posted a 101 billion dollar profit in 2000 later that year 140 billion in profits, and less than a year later in 2001 the company was bankrupt by December. The share holders, employees, people who invested in Enron all lost everything that they invested into Enron. Employees lost their retirement funds, 401 plans and lost their jobs all together. The major share holders got rich in a short amount of time off of this scam. Both the individuals and institutional investors were misinformed about Enron’s financial performance and accounting which everyone involved lost millions and millions dollars. Accounting to this day has ever been changed because of this scandal Enron was pulling off before they got greedy and somewhat sloppy. After the public was scammed out of millions of dollars a law was passed that every publicly traded...
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...going to looking at the Enron Scandal to see how this company’s unethical behavior brought it to an end, to see who were the injured parties; to see how this company’s unethical behavior affected the company and society, and to see if the unethical behavior could have been avoided or resolved? According to the New York Times (2002), in early 2000, Enron, the natural gas pipeline company turned online phenomenon, held a daylong conference in Huston for Wall Street analysts and investors. The audience, packed with financial experts on the natural gas and power industries, was wowed by all the talk of Enron’s online capabilities, especially its rapidly growing business of electronically matching buyers and sellers of numerous commodities like electricity and even network bandwidth. To keep its mystique alive and its stock price growing, it set up partnerships where it could bury its losses, or generate imaginary revenues. Here's one of the more audacious examples, pieced together by The Wall Street Journal: Enron invested a bunch of money in a joint venture with Blockbuster to rent out movies online. The deal flopped eight months later. But in the meantime Enron had secretly set up a partnership with a Canadian bank. The bank essentially lent Enron $115 million in exchange for Enron's profits from the movie venture over its first 10 years. The Blockbuster deal never made a penny, but Enron counted the Canadian loan as a nice, fat profit (Enron-For-Dummies New York Times...
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...accounting scams from companies all over the world. We all remember one of the most publicized cases of fraud, Enron. For many years there has been fraudulent activity in many companies. Sarbanes-Oxley was established to prevent these types of scandals. Some believe it is not as valuable as once predicted, but is anything 100% preventable? Prior to Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission was in place since 1934. It was established to police U.S. financial markets. However after years of failure and proof that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s wasn’t enough, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was born. In 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act was created by Senator Paul Sarbanes and Representative Michael Oxley. Several large company failures not only sparked the public on fraud activity, but also these two gentlemen who decided to put into place something that would enforce financial honesty in businesses. There are several layers to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. ,For example section 404 requires companies to have internal control report with their annual audits. This section of Sarbanes-Oxley also puts accountability and personal liability on the accounting teams of the companies. The infamous Enron scandal unraveled itself in 2001. Enron marketed gas and electricity among other public utilities. They were the 6th largest energy company in the world. In addition, they also provided financial and risk management services to customers all over the globe. Enron was established...
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...known for one of the biggest frauds in corporate America. The company is Enron and I found an article that is titled " The Case Analysis of the Scandal of Enron" and in this article the author talks about the business practices on Enron and the unethical research they used to grow their business and in the end they ruined a lot of good people's lives, and damaged their futures. According to "Dictionary.com" (2013) ethics are the values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions. Every person has ethics and a code that they live by, but the difference is that not everyone has that same code and especially in the business world that word can be tricky for people and standing up for the code they believe in is hard for some. Unethical business practices is not a new thing, and as the economy has grown these practices have been more common. One unethical practice would be skewing the research results, or the skewing the research from your company. That is one thing that Enron did do, and they even took a step further and did certain practices that no one had ever thought of before. Enron was a natural gas company, and what they did is that they built power plants in a few different places and they took their future earnings from those power plants and recognized them as current assets, so Enron was the first to sell future stocks for their gas and electric company...
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...The Fall of Enron is a perfect example of management failure. Enron started off as a merger between Houston Natural Gas and Inter-North. A few years after the merger, Enron started changing the strategy and structure of the organization. Enron went from a raw materials management company to a company selling energy commodities. Enron proceeded to change from an energy company to a risk management firm that traded everything from commodities to derivatives. Enron failed for many reasons, ranging from organizational leadership, conflict of interest, and the off-book financials, which created an ethical disaster for the organization. Various organizational behavior lessons have learned from Enron’s fall from grace. The following paper will discuss some of the reasons for Enron’s internal combustion. Enron’s unethical organizational behavior was the main reason for allowing various illegal actions to take place, which killed the organization in the end. Organizational behavior is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organization’s effectiveness ("Enron 101," 2002, p. 41). In the demise of Enron the leaders were producing behaviors contingent on demands, constraints, and choices that affected the behavior of the organization. In Enron’s situation the demands were for the company to be successful, which affected...
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...Enron: The Fall Of A Wall Street Darling Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/09/enron-collapse.asp?partner=basics120111#ixzz1fiw28U4O Enron is a company that reached dramatic heights, only to face a dizzying collapse. The story ends with the bankruptcy of one of America's largest corporations. Enron's collapse affected the lives of thousands of employees, many pension funds and shook Wall Street to its very core. To this day, many wonder how a company so big and so powerful disappeared almost overnight. How did it manage to fool the regulators and the Wall Street community for so long, with fake off-the-books corporations? What is the overall lasting impact that Enron has had on the investment community and the country in general? Tutorial: Introduction To Accounting Collapse of a Wall Street Darling By the fall of 2000, Enron was starting to crumble under its own weight. CEO Jeffrey Skilling had a way of hiding the financial losses of the trading business and other operations of the company; it was called mark-to-market accounting. This is used in the trading of securities, when you determine what the actual value of the security is at the moment. This can work well for securities, but it can be disastrous for other businesses. In Enron's case, the company would build an asset, such as a power plant, and immediately claim the projected profit on its books, even though it hadn't made one dime from it. If the revenue from the power plant was less...
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...2002 an Act by the name of Sarbanes-Oxley was implemented following the bankruptcy of Enron, an American energy, commodities, and Service Company that was based out of Houston, Texas. This paper will discuss and describe the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; also it will answer such questions as: Why was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act enacted? What was the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act? Also, my opinion of whether or not I thing this Act will somehow stop accounting practices. This Act is surely a case of one bad apple spoils a bunch. Sarbanes-Oxley Act The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a case of one bad apple spoiling a bunch. What is meant by this statement is because of one company’s selfishness and greed; a lot of other companies now have different hoops to jump and straight lines to walk, to keep the same thing from happening again. Not to say outright that the Act is a bad thing because it’s not. When companies go bankrupt that particular company is not the only thing that is affected, these companies have investors and stockholders and they too are affected. This act will allow for such companies and their employers to stay on the straight and narrow. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in 2002 following the bankruptcy of Enron, an energy trade company out of Houston, Texas. According to lawyershop.com, Enron kept the fact that they were billions of dollars in debt from its shareholders (Shaw, 2008). Enron used partnerships with other companies to get away with accounting fraud and making...
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...The Enron Fraud Enron Corporation was a conventional energy company founded in 1985, but soon expanded its operations as an energy trader of derivatives contracts, taking advantage of the deregulation of the energy markets. It also built and operated a variety of assets across the globe, including pipelines, electricity plants, pulp and paper plants, water plants, and broadband services; and provided financial and risk management services to customers worldwide. Enron soon became a world-renowned company and it was labeled as the most innovative company in the U.S. for six consecutive years between 1996 and 2001 by Fortune magazine. It was ranked the sixth largest energy company in the world in 2000, with close to 22,000 employees and nearly $101 billion in revenues. But in 2001 the company’s reputation began to fall following rumors of bribery to obtain contracts in different parts of the world. Likewise, fraudulent accounting techniques, which were supported by its external auditing firm Arthur Andersen, allowed the company to create the largest corporate scam know in U.S. history until then (McLean, 2008). Enron’s fraud consisted of, what its CEO called, creative accounting: off-balance-sheet items, complex financing structures, and deals so bewildering that made financial statements misleading and difficult for the stakeholders to understand, deceiving the main objective of financial reporting which is “to provide financial information about the reporting entity...
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...Andersen, and change in its corporate culture resulting in many unethical business transactions that affected multitudes of primary stakeholders had to close its doors in 2002 after 90 years of business. Review the mandated requirements for legal compliance (from chapter 4) and determine which requirements apply to the Arthur Andersen case. Explain your rationale After re-reading Chapter 4 there are five areas that separate the mandated requirements for legal compliance, and I feel the that two apply to the Arthur Andersen case; the protection of consumers, and incentives to encourage organizational compliance programs. In the laws that protect consumers they require businesses to provide accurate information protecting them from financial scams, unfair, fraudulent, or deceptive practices. There are “Gatekeepers” that are in charge of that such as lawyers, financial rating agencies, and financial reporting services that help enforce high ethical standards. This was the issue wan Andersen as there were no such “Gatekeepers” or compliance programs so they used the loopholes to their advantage. Discuss how the issues with the Arthur Andersen case may have played out differently if the Sarbanes-Oxley Act had been enacted in 1999. The provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley Act help minimize the likelihood of auditor failing to identify accounting irregularities...
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...collapse of Enron impacted many individuals and organizations throughout the world. The extent and severity of each depends on the situation. But one common factor is that all impacts were proven to be negative. Although, it was one of the greatest corporate learning experiences for the entire world. Enron was at its peak in 2000 with stock prices around $90.00 a share. As the company failed, stock prices plummeted to a mere $.67 a share. The company’s thousands of employees had invested their life savings and retirement accounts into the once promising shares. As the company failed, the executives secretly sold off their stock and continued to alter the books. The helpless employees had no choice but to sit back and watch everything they worked for disappear. The employees were left with a life of uncertainty and instability. They were now unemployed and left with an empty bank account. Most would never recover a dime if it wasn’t for the reduction of Jeff Skilling’s sentence in 2013. Skilling’s estimated worth over $40 million. The accounts have been frozen since his arrest and under this new settlement; the prison sentence would be reduced if the $40 million is distributed to those that lost everything when Enron collapsed. The severity of this case has lead to several safeguards being put in place. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed in 2002 as a result of this scandal. The act consists of 11 different parts. The most important were created as a result of the accounting...
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...In just 15 years, Enron grew from nowhere to be America's seventh largest company, employing 21,000 staff in more than 40 countries. But the firm's success turned out to have involved an elaborate scam. Enron lied about its profits and stands accused of a range of shady dealings, including concealing debts so they didn't show up in the company's accounts. As the depth of the deception unfolded, investors and creditors retreated, forcing the firm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December. More than six months after a criminal inquiry was announced, the guilty parties have still not been brought to justice. The Enron scandal has far-reaching political and financial implications. A chorus of outraged investors, employees, pension holders and politicians are demanding to know why Enron's failings were not spotted earlier. And the US Justice Department is thought to be trying to charge several executives for fraud and money laundering. Prosecutors have come to a deal with one insider executive who will plead guilty and spill the beans about Enron's murky finances. There has already been a far-reaching investigation into the scandal by a number of congressional committees. * Three key players appeared involuntarily and then refused to speak in order to avoid incriminating themselves: 1- Andrew Fastow: Former chief financial officer, sacked as the scandal unfolded, and alleged author of the deceptive accounting practices. 2- Kenneth Lay: Enron's former chief executive...
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...would create false financial statements in hopes to raise their stock prices to get more investors. The most notable company to crash was Enron, followed by Global Crossing which is the parent of MCI, and Xerox; later, almost one thousand publicly traded companies restated their financial statements. This resulted in almost $6 trillion of stock market value disappearing (Cunningham, 2003). I decided to do more research to see how many scandals such as these have occurred over the years before the act was created. Phar-Mor Scandal was a popular chain of drugstores in the 90’s. They were accused of mail fraud, embezzlement, bank fraud and transportation of funds received from theft or fraud. Once these illegal activities were discovered, it eventually leads to bankruptcy and over 5,000 employees out of work. Another Scandal happened with the Lehman Brothers Holding Inc, a financial service firm. This scandal began to take place in early 2000’s and was discovered in 2011. This company was caught hiding a debt of 155 billion in bonds and a debt of 639 billion of assets. The company also failed to let their investors know of their financial situation and transactions. The Lehman Brothers Holding Inc. scandal came as a surprise to me because I thought that putting the Sarbanes-Oxley act in place would act as a deterrent from people trying to scam people whether it’s their clients or customers, employees, or investors out of their money but it seems that it hasn’t. ...
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...Enron Corporation Enron was an American energy, commodities, and services company based in Houston, Texas. Before its bankruptcy on December 2, 2001. Enron was formed in 1985 by Kenneth Lay after merging Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth. The corporation grew from nowhere to be America's seventh largest company, employing 21,000 staff in more than 40 countries and was one of the world's major electricity, communication, natural gas, and pulp and paper companies, with claimed revenues of nearly $101 billion during 2000. In addition, Fortune named Enron "America's Most Innovative Company" for six consecutive years. However, the company’s success turned out to have involved an elaborate scam. According to Wikipedia, “Enron shareholders filed a $40 billion law suit after the company's stock price, which achieved a high of US$90.75 per share in mid-2000, plummeted to less than $1 by the end of November 2001 in December 2, 2001. Enron's $63.4 billion in assets made it the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history until WorldCom’s bankruptcy the next year.” Enron's complex financial statements were confusing to shareholders and analysts. Moreover, its complex business model and unethical practices needed that the company use accounting limitations to misrepresent earnings and modify the balance sheet to indicate favorable performance. The combination of these problems later caused the bankruptcy of the firm, and the majority of them were perpetuated by the indirect knowledge...
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...Kovaleva Mary Assignment 3. Enron scandal Rise of the company Enron was an American energy company based in Houston, Texas. It was formed in 1985 by Kenneth Lay after merging Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth. In 1985, Kenneth Lay merged the natural gas pipeline companies of Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth to form Enron. In the early 1990s, he helped to initiate the selling of electricity at market prices and, soon after, the United States Congress passed legislation deregulating the sale of natural gas. The resulting markets made it possible for traders such as Enron to sell energy at higher prices, thereby significantly increasing its revenue. After producers and local governments decried the resultant price volatility and pushed for increased regulation, strong lobbying on the part of Enron and others was able to keep the free market system in place. In just 15 years, Enron grew from nowhere to be America's seventh largest company, employing 21,000 staff in more than 40 countries. In an attempt to achieve further growth, Enron pursued a diversification strategy. The company owned and operated a variety of assets including gas pipelines, electricity plants, pulp and paper plants, water plants, and broadband services across the globe. The corporation also gained additional revenue by trading contracts for the same array of products and services it was involved in. As a result, Enron's stock rose from the start of the 1990s until year-end 1998 by 311% percent. By...
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