STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

Pepper · Kenneth Cole

Enron's Lay found Guilty

Aurora · Marc Jacobs

As someone in the accounting profession I am just glad this case is over. I'm tired of hearing about Enron like its the first company to ever have problems or gone belly up. I have my own opinions on the case and the arguements which I won't get into. I just hate how the media & Congress has overdone the case and basically ran an accounting firm out of business over Enron and created Sarbanes-Oxley Law which doesn't even help or provide extra "assurance" over the financial statements companies submit and investors rely on because you can still defraud people. SOX just creates extra work for accountants and extra costs to companies across the board.

honey · Gucci

if anyone's interested in learning more about enron, i highly recommend the book the smartest guys in the room. haven't seen the movie yet, but the book is sooo good. it does an excellent job of breaking down the major players, and what happened. i also think it's a pretty fair account of what happened in terms of not presenting an obvs bias. imo it'd be pretty hard not to find the heads guilty on some level of defrauding the public, but the book presents a pretty even view of the events and offers some excellent insight into the motivations of key execs and explanation of how something like this could happen.

theotherjess · Chanel

honey wrote:

if anyone's interested in learning more about enron, i highly recommend the book the smartest guys in the room. haven't seen the movie yet, but the book is sooo good. it does an excellent job of breaking down the major players, and what happened. i also think it's a pretty fair account of what happened in terms of not presenting an obvs bias. imo it'd be pretty hard not to find the heads guilty on some level of defrauding the public, but the book presents a pretty even view of the events and offers some excellent insight into the motivations of key execs and explanation of how something like this could happen.

I didn't read the book, but I saw the movie and it's seriously one of my favorites. It was very well made, informative, and funny as hell.

boobaby · Kate Spade

Aurora wrote:

I just hate how the media & Congress has overdone the case and basically ran an accounting firm out of business over Enron

This statement reminded me of how I once met a woman who really drove home the individual suffering that occured because of this mess. I used to be a clerical assistant for a big, soul-less corporation. When I put in my 2 weeks notice, it was not long after Arthur Anderson had gone under. My company brought in temps for me to train to do the front desk. The first one was a woman who had to be close to 65-70. She had been an executive assistant at Arthur Anderson for 35-40 years. She and her boss were old-timers who had their own, old-fashioned way of doing things. She didn't know how to use a computer, she couldn't grasp the phone system (it was not complicated), and she kept pissing off the executives at my company by disconnecting calls or answering the phone wrong, etc. I tried so hard to train her, but she was so timid that when I would walk away, even for a minute, things fell apart. She had just lost her pension and her benefits, and had no modern day office skills.

After 3 day, she made the mistake of hanging up on the CEO. That was it for her. They wanted me to tell her that we wouldn't be needing her anymore. I told them to kiss my ass (not in those words) and that if they had something to tell her, they needed to act like men (again, I only thought this, didn't say it) and do it themselves. Basically I refused. So they did it while I was at lunch. When I came back, she was crying and saying that she guessed she made someone mad and that she didn't know what to do, but she just didn't understand all this technology. It was heart-wrenchingly painful to see and I felt so helpless. It still pains me to think of her and the impossible situation she was put in because of the actions of a few, and that she was just one of thousands who lost everything they had worked for their whole lives.