Fast Acting Texas State Board of Accountancy

I think it's spelled Andersen, but why quibble years later?
"Anderson Accountants Facing Disciplinary Actions," AccountingWeb, November 10, 2005 --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=101466

The Texas State Board of Public Accountancy has filed a complaint against seven former Arthur Anderson accountants who were involved in audit operations for Enron and its subsidiaries. The Houston Chronicle reports that they failed to adequately examine and report financial events leading to Enron’s implosion according to the filed complaint. The complaint was filed with the State Office of Administrative Hearings. The complaint reads that the seven accountants audited a portion of Enron’s 1997 financial statements and allegedly did not follow proper accounting procedures that specified they consolidate the statements of the two subsidiaries named for Star Wars characters, Chewco and Jedi. After notification by the Securities and Exchange Commission, these statements were changed by Enron according to the Houston Chronicle.

The Houston Chronicle reports that actions leading from the complaint include suspension or revocation of their state accounting licenses. Arthur Anderson’s accounting license was revoked in 2002. The seven accountants may also receive fines of $1000 for each violation alleged in the complaint according to the Associated Press. There has been no date specified for their hearing.

November 11, 2005 message from Clikeman, Paul [pclikema@RICHMOND.EDU]

Can somebody please help me understand this news item?

 David Duncan, who pleaded guilty to a felony, is not one of the seven AA auditors named in the complaint. Has he already been disciplined by the Texas Board?

 And Carl Bass is named in the current complaint. The media portrayed Bass as a “hero” in 2002 for objecting to Enron’s SPE accounting. Joseph Berardino claimed in a television interview that Bass was removed from the Enron audit because Enron’s executives complained about Bass’s refusal to cooperate. Is Bass not as innocent as earlier news items indicated?

 Paul M. Clikeman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Accounting
Robins School of Business
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173
pclikema@richmond.edu

November 11, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

If you read Page 426-427 (especially the bottom of Page 427) of Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald, you get the idea that Carl Bass was made a fall guy, by Andersen executives, in Braveheart, Fishtail, and Raptor.

Bass seemed all along to argue with Duncan about accounting for derivatives and SPEs, which is why Duncan himself had Bass removed from the Enron audit.  Some might argue that Bass could have done more early on in reporting his side of things with John Stewart in Chicago.  In some ways I agree with this.  Carl Bass seemed to be a good auditor who just did not blow the whistle effectively until it was too late.  I think he had ample evidence that Duncan was not going to listen to reason and buck Rick Causey at Enron.

Bob Jensen

The day Arthur Andersen loses the public's trust is the day we are out of business.  
Steve Samek, Country Managing Partner, United States, on Andersen's Independence and Ethical Standards CD-Rom, 1999.

When the Securities and Exchange Commission found evidence in e-mail messages that a senior partner at Andersen had participated in the fraud at Waste Management, Andersen did not fire him. Instead, it put him to work revising the firm's document-retention policy. Unsurprisingly, the new policy emphasized the need to destroy documents and did not specify that should stop if an S.E.C. investigation was threatened. It was that policy David Duncan, the Andersen partner in charge of Enron audits, claimed to be following when he shredded Andersen's reputation.

Floyd Norris, "Will Big Four Audit Firms Survive in a World of Unlimited Liability?," The New York Times, September 10, 2004

In his eulogy for Arthur Andersen, delivered on January 13, 1947 the Rev. Dr. Duncan E. Littlefair closed with the following words:

Mr. Andersen had great courage.  Few are the men who have as much faith in the right as he, and fewer still are those with the courage to live up to their faith as he did...For those of you who worked with him and carry on his company, the meaning is clear.  Those principles upon which his business was built and with which it is synonymous must be preserved.  His name must never be associated with any program or action that is not the highest and the best.  I am sure he would rather the doors be closed than that it should continue to exist on principles other than those he established.  To you he has left a great name.  Your opportunity is tremendous; your responsibility is great.

The most serious problems in our profession are caused by our own self-indulgence.
LEONARD SPACEK, CEO of the major accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, 1956
Loren Steffy, "Sage of ethical accounting foretold Andersen demise," The Houston Chronicle, January 13, 2005 (I thank Paul Bjorklund for pointing this article out to me.)

It is not too much to expect that principles have a place in business today.  They do.  It's too late for this once-great Firm, but there's still time for the rest of us.
As quoted from pp. 253-254 in Final Accounting, by Barbara Ley Toffler (Broadway Books, 2003).  I might  note that the main message at the start of Barbara Ley Toffler’s book is that Andersen adopted a policy of overcharging for services or in her words “padding the bill.”  This perhaps was the beginning of the end!
You can read about Arthur Andersen at http://fisher.osu.edu/acctmis/hall/members-chrono.htm 

Nothing wrong with overcharging, so long as everyone else is doing it, right?
Gretchen Morgenson"The Mutual Fund Scandal's Next Chapter," The New York Times, December 7, 2003
(For threads on the mutual fund scandals, see Rotten to the Core below.)

So what's a little business deal among friends?  It's trouble, if the friends are college or college-foundation trustees who benefit personally from the decisions they make on behalf of the institutions they serve.  
Julianne Basinger, "Boars Crack Down on Members' Insider Benefits," The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 6. 2004, Page A1.

The open-access method of distributing scientific journals, says John E. Cox, a publishing-industry consultant, "is the most articulate and serious threat to the conventional publishing market that we've seen."
Lila Gutterman, "The Promise and Peril of 'Open Access,'" The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2004, Page A10.
See The Biggest Academic Rip-off of All Time by Publishing Monopolists --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud033104.htm#MonopolyJournals

Conspiracy of Fools

Sometimes the key mover in Enron's shady dealings, CFO Andy Fastow, was portrayed by the media as a financial genius.  This may not be the case.
Somebody called in Kaminski.  He was soft-spoken yet excitable, a man who quickly assessed colleagues' brainpower --- and Fastow had never made it high on his list of high-voltage intellects.  Long ago, when Fastow had incorrectly boasted that his business was unaffected by interest rate, Kaminski had concluded the man was a lightweight . . . Kaminski smiled to himself.   "How could a man like this be in charge of a business?" A hedge could only offset declines in an asset's value, not operating losses from a failing business.  The only hedge for a money-losing business was a moneymaking business---and one of those certainly wasn't going to be coming out of this meeting.
Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools (Broadway Books, 2005, pp. 9394).
 

Nor are Andersen's managing partners on the Enron audit portrayed as rocket scientists.
Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools (Broadway Books, 2005, pp. 138-139).

Since 1990, Stephen Goddard at Andersen had overseen Enron--meeting the board, reviewing deals, auditing financials.  Goddard wasn't Hollywood's idea of an accountant; this was no boring technocrat with green eyeshades.  He was a specialist in client services, a backslapper who maintained a close relationship with the managers whose numbers his team reviewed.

Thanks in part to that familiarity, Andersen and Enron developed an unusually close relationship.  The firm was both its auditor and its consultant.  Veterans of Andersen's Houston office jumped to Enron as internal auditors; even Rick Causey, Enron's top accounting guru, had been an Andersen manager.  The relationship couldn't have been cozier.

But by February 1997, things had to change.  Andersen rotated partners on accounts every seven years, and Goddard's time was up.  Some partners lobbied to move up Tom Bauer, a top-notch accountant, who audited Enron's trading operations.  But Goddard thought there was only one candidate--David Duncan, a thirty-six-year-old who had worked on Enron for years.  With Goddard's support, Duncan got the nod.

Duncan rarely impressed anyone as a towering intellect, and his background was unremarkable.  Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and raised in Beaumont, Texas, Duncan attended Texas A&M, where he studied accounting.  In college he had been something of a party boy; he and a group of friends had formed what amounted to a co-op for illicit drugs, purchasing large quantities of marijuana that they divided among themselves.  Often, Duncan and his pals could be found around campus laughing it up, stoned.

In 1981, straight out of college, Duncan joined Andersen's Houston office but didn't change his ways.  For years, he and his friends kept up their mass drug buying.  Several days a week he would leave the staid accounting world and head home to toke up; sometimes he branched out to cocaine.  But a few years after starting on the Enron engagement, Duncan straightened up.  He didn't used illegal drugs since.

Enron seemed the ideal assignment.  In his early days at Andersen, Duncan struck up a friendship with Causey, then just another accountant in the Houston office.  The two became close, often lunching, golfing, or going out with their wives.  Now his buddy was Enron's top accountant.

Clearly, Duncan was no accounting whiz, but nobody worried about that; like most partners, he would rely on the experts in the firm's Professional Standards Group to rule on tough issues.  But he stuck some partners as top-flight where it mattered--his familiarity with Enron and a close relationship with its executives.  His good looks and disciplined organization didn't hurt, either.

In early February, Goddard and Duncan had an appointment with Lay, to notify him of the coming change.  Lay was polite, if not particularly interested; he vaguely knew Duncan and thought he seemed competent enough.

"I'm very excited about the opportunity to work more closely with Enron," Duncan said.  "It's really an honor."

Lay smiled.  "We'll have a lot of fun," he said.

By any measure, Duncan seemed a man on the precipice of big things.  But it was not to be; the great opportunity at Enron would be his last high-profile accounting job.

 

Jensen Comment:
It was Enron CEO Jeff Skilling who really got Enron into its illegal trading practices, although in fairness he did not view them as illegal when he came up (while a consultant to Enron from McKinsie) with some very clever ideas for getting Enron into the energy trading business.  Skilling is portrayed as the smartest of Enron's dim-light bulb executives but he also became the least mentally and emotionally stable.  He was great when things were rolling well but collapsed badly under pressures and pending bad news. 

The Causey of It All --- At Long Last

Of all the Enron accounting executives (Fastow was the CFO who knew epsilon about accounting) I wanted Rick Causey sent up river. Causey was the Chief Accounting Officer who worked out most of the accounting fraud and was the closest conspirator with David Duncan, Andersen's manager of the less-than-independent audit. Causey mysteriously was not called on to testify in the trials of Lay and Skilling, purportedly because he was "not a rat." It appears that he was a bit more of a rat than previously reported.

"Ex-Enron Officer Given 5½ Years in Prison," The New York Times, November 16, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/business/16enron.html

Richard A. Causey, the last of the top Enron executives to learn his punishment, was sentenced Wednesday to five and a half years in prison for his role in the corporate accounting scandal.

Mr. Causey, 46, the company’s former chief accounting officer, pleaded guilty in December to securities fraud, two weeks before he was to be tried along with the founder of Enron, Kenneth L. Lay, and the former chief executive, Jeffrey K. Skilling, on conspiracy, fraud and other charges related to the company’s collapse.

Mr. Causey had agreed to serve seven years in prison. Prosecutors said they could have recommended it be reduced to five if they were pleased with his cooperation.

Mr. Causey also agreed to pay $1.25 million to the government and to forfeit a claim to about $250,000 in deferred compensation as part of his plea deal. Unlike some others at Enron, he did not skim millions of dollars for himself.

Prosecutors dropped their plan to seize Mr. Causey’s home, a $950,000 two-story red-brick house in a Houston suburb.

Mr. Causey had faced more than 30 counts of conspiracy, fraud, insider trading, lying to auditors and money laundering.

In his guilty plea, made in Federal District Court, he admitted making false public findings and statements.

He did not testify in the Lay-Skilling trial this year, though he was on the defense witness list.

Mr. Skilling and Mr. Lay were convicted in May of conspiracy and fraud. Mr. Lay’s convictions were wiped out with his July death from heart disease. Mr. Skilling was sentenced last month to more than 24 years in prison.

Andrew S. Fastow, Enron’s former chief financial officer, whose schemes helped doom the company, was sentenced in September to six years.

Mark E. Koenig, Enron’s former director of investor relations, and Michael J. Kopper, an Enron managing director and Mr. Fastow’s top aide, are scheduled to be sentenced Friday.

Enron collapsed into bankruptcy in December 2001 after years of accounting tricks could no longer hide billions in debt or make failing ventures appear profitable.

Bob Jensen's threads on Rick Causey are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnronQuiz.htm

Why white collar crime pays for Chief Enron Accountant: 
Rick Causey's fine for filing false Enron financial statements:    $1,250,000
Rick Causey's stock sales benefiting from the false reports:     $13,386,896
That averages out to winnings of $2,427,379 per year for each of the five years he's expected to be in prison
You can read what others got at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm#StockSales 
Nice work if you can get it:  Club Fed's not so bad if you earn $6,650 per day plus all the accrued interest over the past 15 years.

"Enron’s Lasting Influence," AccountingWeb, January 10, 2006 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=101647

With the former Enron executives finally coming to trial, we are reminded again of the long shadow cast by the implosion of the company that helped enact the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002. Section 404 has added teeth to SOX, making regulation more expensive and staff intensive and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) has been created to aid in the governance and enforcement of the accounting industry. Audit committees have attained more important positions in corporate structures and are more attuned to avoid the conflicts of being both auditor and consultant for the same company. At the same time, with the collapse of Arthur Andersen, the consolidation of the Big Five to the Big Four now have four accounting firms doing the work for more than 90 percent of publicly traded companies, according to the New York Times.

“We certainly have seen some improvements in governance, but we’ve also seen some areas of no improvement, and some areas where things have gone backwards,” said Lynn E. Turner, speaking to the New York Times. Turner is the former chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and now managing director of research at Glass, Lewis & Company.

The outright accounting scandals of WorldCom, Tyco, and Adelphia have now morphed into companies making financial restatements. Glass, Lewis & Company reports that earnings restatements numbered 1,031 through the end of October 2005, compared with 650 for 2004 and 270 in 2001, according to the New York Times. John C. Coffee, speaking in the Los Angeles Times, said the restatements were not necessarily evidence of fraud but shows the tighter focus of accountants.

Also, more than 1,250 public companies, out of around 15,000 in total, reported material weaknesses in their internal corporate controls in October 2005. Some 232 other companies reported less serious, but significant deficiencies in their internal controls, according to the New York Times.

In contrast, a new study shows that the number of securities class-action suites has come down 17 percent in 2005. The 176 filed in 2005 is the lowest since 1997, according to Cornerstone Research and Stanford Law School. 1998 saw 239 suites, the highest number in recent years, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Christopher Cox, chairman of the SEC, said in a late December interview with the New York Times, that he agreed that more should be done, disclosing his intention to lead a commission effort to rewrite rules forcing companies to provide more financial details concerning executive pay.

Tighter accounting and disclosure rules enacted to enhance the transparency of financial information have lead to an industry-lead backlash. Cox said to the New York Times that it “would be a mistake” to retract major provisions of SOX.

“The shocks were so big that no director could miss the lesson and if they did miss somehow, the significant changes in the law made it absolutely certain that they are now more focused,” Cox added. “With just a few years of Sarbanes-Oxley under their belts, most companies are begrudgingly admitting that the exercise is producing benefits.”

SOX has sincere proponents though, institutional and pension investor groups being the most vocal. Alan G. Hevesi, New York comptroller of one of the nation’s largest institutional investors, has been leading the effort to increase corporate accountability. Speaking with the New York Times, Hevesi said, “We’ve had some successes in corporate governance reform. In other words – such as giving a greater voice to shareholders to elect independent directors and curbing excessive executive compensation – we haven’t been as successful. I worry about whether the necessary reforms have really been institutionalized.”

Executives say that restatements are healthy signs of change according to the New York Times although, “The general impression of the public is that accounting rules are black and white. They are often anything but that, and in many instances the changes in earnings came after new interpretations by the chief accountant of the S.E.C.," said Steve Odland, Office Depot’s CEO and head of a corporate governance task force at the Business Roundtable.

Accounting scandals are more often settled with the SEC or actions filed by the agency now. For example, AcAfee, the Internet security company, has agreed to settle charges made by the SEC that they inflated revenues by some $622 million between 1998 and 2000. Their penalty will be $50 million. The settlement is awaiting court approval.

The SEC filed a civil lawsuit against six former executives then employed by an unnamed transfer-agent unit of Putnam Investments last week. They allegedly defrauded mutual funds and clients out of some $4 million in 2001. Also the judge has ruled that SEC testimony will be allowed into the trials of former Enron executives Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay.

What are some of the main lessons learned from the Enron scandal? 
I especially like "Suggestions for Reform" listed at http://www.citizenworks.org/corp/reforms.php

A pretty good summary of lessons learned is provided at http://www.law.northwestern.edu/professionaled/documents/Ruder_Lessons_Enron.pdf

Bob Jensen's threads on reforms are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudProposedReforms.htm

Bob Jensen's Enron Quiz is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnronQuiz.htm

Professional Fees in Enron Bankruptcy Top $780 million (as of December 2004) --- http://www.accountingweb.com/item/100263 
Guess who pays the next time you pay your power bill?

A jury has convicted four former Merrill Lynch executives and a former Enron finance executive for helping push through a sham deal to pad the energy company's earnings
"5 Executives Convicted of Fraud in First Enron Trial," The New York Times, November 3, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/03WIRE-ENRON.html 

Update on October 2007

Then how come Merrill Lynch is on the verge of escaping the wrath of investors because of its involvement in some of Enron's corporate and accounting frauds? The Securities and Exchange Commission lays out the facts in various documents such as Litigation Release No. 20159 and Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Release No. 2619, and in the related Complaint in the U.S. District Court.
"The Accounting Cycle:  The Merrill Lynch-Enron-Government Conspiracy," by: J. Edward Ketz, SmartPros, October 2007 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x59129.xml 

In a 2004 trial, a jury found these four Merrill executives guilty of participating in a fraudulent scheme. The former Merrill managers appealed the verdicts, and amazingly the Fifth Circuit tossed them out. The appellate court held that those bankers provided "honest services" and that they did not personally profit from the deal.

That argument assumes that getaway drivers supply honest services to bank robbers; after all, an oral agreement to repurchase the investment at 22 percent return is a strong signal that something is amiss with the transaction. The argument also shows a lack of understanding how managers profit in the real world. Investment bankers advance their careers by bringing in business that generates income for the bank; Merrill Lynch's executives did that with the Enron barge transaction, thereby promoting their careers, their promotions, and their salaries and bonuses, even if in an indirect fashion.

 

Enron documentary will be available soon
For the preview screening in Houston last week of the documentary " Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," two indicted executives from the company, Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, were not in the room - even though their multimillion-dollar homes were just a few blocks from the theater. "We invited them, but we didn't hear back," Alex Gibney, the documentary's director, said with a straight face. Hundreds of former Enron employees, however, did attend the screening. Many groaned and shook their heads at archival clips in which top-level management appeared arrogant, dishonest and greedy. "Try 'em and fry 'em," said Michael Ratner, who was a manager in Enron's pipeline division and now works for an investment bank. But in the same breath, he said wistfully: "It was a great place to work. You could do anything if you proved that you could make money."
Kate Murphy, "Mr. Skilling, Come On Over," The New York Times, April 24, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/business/yourmoney/24suits.html

Sherron Watkins' whistle blowing Memo2 to Enron CEO Ken Lay as quoted on Page 366 of her book  Power Failure (Doubleday, 2003):

Summary of Raptor oddities: 

1.  The accounting treatment looks questionable. 

a. Enron booked a $500 mm gain from equity derivatives from a related party. 
b. That related party is thinly capitalized, with no party at risk except Enron. 
c. It appears Enron has supported an income statement gain by a contribution of its own shares.

One basic question: The related party entity has lost $500 mm in its equity derivative transactions with Enron. Who bears that loss? I can't find an equity or debt holder that bears that loss. Find out who will lose this money. Who will pay for this loss at the related party entity?

Scandals Are a Hot Topic in College Courses --- http://www.smartpros.com/x42201.xml

The Lawyers and Accountants Hit'em Hardest When Their Down
Executives from failed energy giant Enron say its total legal and accounting costs since declaring bankruptcy may top $1 billion by 2006, according to a newspaper report.
SmartPros, November 14, 2003 --- http://www.smartpros.com/x41372.xml 

Enron had done its homework in Washington. Help came largely from the husband-and-wife team of economists Senator Phil Gramm and his wife, Wendy. Before joining the Enron board, Wendy Gramm had exempted energy futures contracts from government oversight in 1992; her husband now pushed for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in December 2000, which would deregulate energy trading. There was strong opposition to Phil Gramm's bill in the House, mainly from the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, who included Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers; Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve; and Arthur Levitt, chairman of the SEC. But Enron spent close to $2 million lobbying to combat that opposition, while Gramm kept the bill from floor debate in the waning days of the Clinton administration. He reintroduced it under a new name immediately after Bush assumed office and got his bill passed. Enron, in turn, got the opportunity to trade with abandon. No one needed to know--or could find out--how much power Enron owned and how or why the company moved it from place to place.
Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, by Mimi Swartz, Sherron Watkins, Page 227.  See "What was Enron getting for its political bribes?"

"Who Will Fastow Implicate? Enron's ex-CFO is a loose cannon who could shoot in several directions, at a string of Enron execs, bankers, and lawyers," Business Week, January 15, 2004 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2004/nf20040115_1433_db035.htm 

It's a safe bet that a lot of people in Houston probably had trouble falling asleep last night. Now that former Enron (ENRNQ ) Corp. Chief Financial Officer Andrew S. Fastow has joined forces with the Justice Dept., he could potentially implicate dozens of execs, bankers, and lawyers for contributing to the company's downfall (see BW Online, 1/8/04, "From the Fastows to the Bigger Fish?"). Unlike WorldCom (WCOEQ ), Tyco (TYC ) HealthSouth, (HLSH ), and many other recent corporate scandals, where the circle of accused wrongdoers is small, the Enron case involved "large groups of officers and employees, representing such diverse functions as finance, accounting, tax, and legal," according to a report filed last year by bankruptcy examiner R. Neal Batson.

Continued in the article

Does all of this add up to a convincing indictment against the market? No. Even those economists like MIT's Paul Joskow who are most convinced that illegal market manipulation played a major role in the California meltdown continue to support the introduction of (better designed) markets to the electricity sector. Other economists are of the opinion that market design ought to be left to trial and error in the context of more complete deregulation rather than to some template drafted by experts who think they can know a priori how electricity markets could best be organized.
Jerry Taylor (See below.)

A paragraph form Page 360 of Pipe Dreams:  Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, by Robert Bryce (Public Affairs, 2002):

On June 17, Enron filed documents in bankruptcy court that showed total cash payments of $309.8 million to a group of 144 top Enron executives during 2001. In addition, those same executives cashed in stock options worth $311.7 million. There were lots of other perquisites that haven't been made public. According to one Enron insider, since the bankruptcy the company has been canceling club memberships all over Houston. When Enron filed for bankruptcy, the insider said, the company was paying for twenty-nine different country club memberships, each of which were costing the company an average of $28,000 per year.

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made!
Arthur Bloch  (although Chris Nolan says it should be attributed to Daniel Schorr)

New York State Attorney General Eliott Spitzer's charges of improper trading practices by several leading mutual fund families are another blow to public trust in financial institutions. Mutual funds have been the place you would advise the most unsophisticated investors to go: Mutual funds were designed for grandpa and grandma, and repeatedly recommended to them by all kinds of benevolent authorities. Thus scandals in the mutual fund sector are potentially much more damaging to public trust in our financial institutions than are scandals in other sectors -- such as the one playing out in the New York Stock Exchange right now.
See Robert Shiller's article below under "Rotten to the Core"

Good accounting serves as a check on speculation.  Good accounting challenges the pyramid scheme that bubbles perpetuate.  Bad accounting perpetuates pyramid schemes.  Bad accounting creates false earnings momentum that feeds price momentum.  GAAP , unfortunately, does have features that can be used to perpetuate bubbles. 
Stephen H. Penman, Financial Statement Analysis and Security Valuation (McGraw-Hill, 2004, Page 48).

Off Balance Sheet Financing Lives On
"Creative Deal or Highflying Pork?" by Leslie Wayne, The New York Times, April 28, 2003

The plan — in which Boeing and the Air Force propose to employ the kind of off-the-books financing made infamous by the Enron scandal — could provide Boeing up to $30 billion in fresh military contracts. The proposal would lease 100 planes — Boeing 767 airborne refueling tankers — to the Air Force. To critics, it is a perfect example not only of creative accounting but also of the political pork that has crept into government spending since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and an influential member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has called the Boeing proposal "cockamamie" and has vowed "to do everything I can to see the taxpayers of America are protected from this military-industrial rip-off." But what is a rip-off to Senator McCain, who has thrown one roadblock after another in front of the proposal, is portrayed by Boeing and the Air Force as a cost-effective way to provide a new link in the military supply chain as the Air Force begins to face the issue of replacing aging air refueling tankers. Some of the tankers date back to the Eisenhower administration, and many are now in use refueling Air Force military jets over Iraq and Afghanistan. "New tankers are a critical need," said Marvin R. Sambur, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisitions. "But we don't have that money to put out front." The lease proposal, he said, "gives us the ability to leverage the total amount of money the Air Force has. It's a super lease deal." But studies from the General Accounting Office, the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, some ordered by Senator McCain, conclude that the Boeing-Air Force lease option is more costly than buying the planes outright. The studies also say the lease plan is far more expensive than simply overhauling the existing tanker fleet, an option the Air Force calls unrealistic, given the fleet's age. Now Mr. Rumsfeld must choose between the two sides. At a news conference last month, he declined to tip his hand as the Pentagon budget begins to move through Congress. He said that the issue was complex and that he had asked for more information. "And it's something that I guess I'll decide when I decide," he said. "But I don't need to set arbitrary deadlines as to when that might be."

Selected works of FRANK PARTNOY
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

1.  Who is Frank Partnoy?

Cheryl Dunn requested that I do a review of my favorites among the “books that have influenced [my] work.”   Immediately the succession of FIASCO books by Frank Partnoy came to mind.  These particular books are not the best among related books by Wall Street whistle blowers such as Liar's Poker: Playing the Money Markets by Michael Lewis in 1999 and Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle by John Rolfe and Peter Troob in 2002.  But in1997.  Frank Partnoy was the first writer to open my eyes to the enormous gap between our assumed efficient and fair capital markets versus the “infectious greed” (Alan Greenspan’s term) that had overtaken these markets.

Partnoy’s succession of FIASCO books, like those of Lewis and Rolfe/Troob are reality books written from the perspective of inside whistle blowers.  They are somewhat repetitive and anecdotal mainly from the perspective of what each author saw and interpreted. 

My favorite among the capital market fraud books is Frank Partnoy’s latest book Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets (Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, 2003, ISBN: 080507510-0- 477 pages).  This is the most scholarly of the books available on business and gatekeeper degeneracy.  Rather than relying mostly upon his own experiences, this book drawn from Partnoy’s interviews of over 150 capital markets insiders of one type or another.  It is more scholarly because it demonstrates Partnoy’s evolution of learning about extremely complex structured financing packages that were the instruments of crime by banks, investment banks, brokers, and securities dealers in the most venerable firms in the U.S. and other parts of the world.  The book is brilliant and has a detailed and helpful index.

What did I learn most from Partnoy?

I learned about the failures and complicity of what he terms “gatekeepers” whose fiduciary responsibility was to inoculate against “infectious greed.”  These gatekeepers instead manipulated their professions and their governments to aid and abet the criminals.  On Page 173 of Infectious Greed, he writes the following: 

Page #173

When Republicans captured the House of Representatives in November 1994--for the first time since the Eisenhower era--securities-litigation reform was assured.  In a January 1995 speech, Levitt outlined the limits on securities regulation that Congress later would support: limiting the statute-of-limitations period for filing lawsuits, restricting legal fees paid to lead plaintiffs, eliminating punitive-damages provisions from securities lawsuits, requiring plaintiffs to allege more clearly that a defendant acted with reckless intent, and exempting "forward looking statements"--essentially, projections about a company's future--from legal liability.

The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 passed easily, and Congress even overrode the veto of President Clinton, who either had a fleeting change of heart about financial markets or decided that trial lawyers were an even more important constituency than Wall Street.  In any event, Clinton and Levitt disagreed about the issue, although it wasn't fatal to Levitt, who would remain SEC chair for another five years.

He later introduces Chapter 7 of Infectious Greed as follows:

Pages 187-188

The regulatory changes of 1994-95 sent three messages to corporate CEOs.  First, you are not likely to be punished for "massaging" your firm's accounting numbers.  Prosecutors rarely go after financial fraud and, even when they do, the typical punishment is a small fine; almost no one goes to prison.  Moreover, even a fraudulent scheme could be recast as mere earnings management--the practice of smoothing a company's earnings--which most executives did, and regarded as perfectly legal.

Second, you should use new financial instruments--including options, swaps, and other derivatives--to increase your own pay and to avoid costly regulation.  If complex derivatives are too much for you to handle--as they were for many CEOs during the years immediately following the 1994 losses--you should at least pay yourself in stock options, which don't need to be disclosed as an expense and have a greater upside than cash bonuses or stock.

Third, you don't need to worry about whether accountants or securities analysts will tell investors about any hidden losses or excessive options pay.  Now that Congress and the Supreme Court have insulated accounting firms and investment banks from liability--with the Central Bank decision and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act--they will be much more willing to look the other way.  If you pay them enough in fees, they might even be willing to help.

Of course, not every corporate executive heeded these messages.  For example, Warren Buffett argued that managers should ensure that their companies' share prices were accurate, not try to inflate prices artificially, and he criticized the use of stock options as compensation.  Having been a major shareholder of Salomon Brothers, Buffett also criticized accounting and securities firms for conflicts of interest.

But for every Warren Buffett, there were many less scrupulous CEOs.  This chapter considers four of them: Walter Forbes of CUC International, Dean Buntrock of Waste Management, Al Dunlap of Sunbeam, and Martin Grass of Rite Aid.  They are not all well-known among investors, but their stories capture the changes in CEO behavior during the mid-1990s.  Unlike the "rocket scientists" at Bankers Trust, First Boston, and Salomon Brothers, these four had undistinguished backgrounds and little training in mathematics or finance.  Instead, they were hardworking, hard-driving men who ran companies that met basic consumer needs: they sold clothes, barbecue grills, and prescription medicine, and cleaned up garbage.  They certainly didn't buy swaps linked to LIBOR-squared.

The book Infectious Greed has chapters on other capital markets and corporate scandals.  It is the best account that I’ve ever read about Bankers Trust the Bankers Trust scandals, including how one trader named Andy Krieger almost destroyed the entire money supply of New Zealand.  Chapter 10 is devoted to Enron and follows up on Frank Partnoy’s invited testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, January 24, 2002 --- http://www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/012402partnoy.htm

The controversial writings of Frank Partnoy have had an enormous impact on my teaching and my research.  Although subsequent writers wrote somewhat more entertaining exposes, he was the one who first opened my eyes to what goes on behind the scenes in capital markets and investment banking.  Through his early writings, I discovered that there is an enormous gap between the efficient financial world that we assume in agency theory worshipped in academe versus the dark side of modern reality where you find the cleverest crooks out to steal money from widows and orphans in sophisticated ways where it is virtually impossible to get caught.  Because I read his 1997  book early on, the ensuing succession of enormous scandals in finance, accounting, and corporate governance weren’t really much of a surprise to me.

From his insider perspective he reveals a world where our most respected firms in banking, market exchanges, and related financial institutions no longer care anything about fiduciary responsibility and professionalism in disgusting contrast to the honorable founders of those same firms motivated to serve rather than steal.

Young men and women from top universities of the world abandoned almost all ethical principles while working in investment banks and other financial institutions in order to become not only rich but filthy rich at the expense of countless pension holders and small investors.  Partnoy opened my eyes to how easy it is to get around auditors and corporate boards by creating structured financial contracts that are incomprehensible and serve virtually no purpose other than to steal billions upon billions of dollars.

Most importantly, Frank Partnoy opened my eyes to the psychology of greed.  Greed is rooted in opportunity and cultural relativism.  He graduated from college with a high sense of right and wrong.  But his standards and values sank to the criminal level of those when he entered the criminal world of investment banking.  The only difference between him and the crooks he worked with is that he could not quell his conscience while stealing from widows and orphans.

Frank Partnoy has a rare combination of scholarship and experience in law, investment banking, and accounting.  He is sometimes criticized for not really understanding the complexities of some of the deals he described, but he rather freely admits that he was new to the game of complex deceptions in international structured financing crime.

2.  What really happened at Enron?

I begin with the following document the best thing I ever read explaining fraud at Enron.
Testimony of Frank Partnoy Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law Hearings before the United States Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, January 24, 2002 --- http://www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/012402partnoy.htm 

The following selected quotations from his Senate testimony speak for themselves:

• Quote:  In other words, OTC derivatives markets, which for the most part did not exist twenty (or, in some cases, even ten) years ago, now comprise about 90 percent of the aggregate derivatives market, with trillions of dollars at risk every day.  By those measures, OTC derivatives markets are bigger than the markets for U.S. stocks. Enron may have been just an energy company when it was created in 1985, but by the end it had become a full-blown OTC derivatives trading firm.  Its OTC derivatives-related assets and liabilities increased more than five-fold during 2000 alone.
  
   
• Quote: And, let me repeat, the OTC derivatives markets are largely unregulated.  Enron’s trading operations were not regulated, or even recently audited, by U.S. securities regulators, and the OTC derivatives it traded are not deemed securities.  OTC derivatives trading is beyond the purview of organized, regulated exchanges.  Thus, Enron – like many firms that trade OTC derivatives – fell into a regulatory black hole.
  
   
• Quote:  Specifically, Enron used derivatives and special purpose vehicles to manipulate its financial statements in three ways.  First, it hid speculator losses it suffered on technology stocks.  Second, it hid huge debts incurred to finance unprofitable new businesses, including retail energy services for new customers.  Third, it inflated the value of other troubled businesses, including its new ventures in fiber-optic bandwidth.  Although Enron was founded as an energy company, many of these derivatives transactions did not involve energy at all.
  
  
   
• Quote:  Moreover, a thorough inquiry into these dealings also should include the major financial market “gatekeepers” involved with Enron: accounting firms, banks, law firms, and credit rating agencies.  Employees of these firms are likely to have knowledge of these transactions.  Moreover, these firms have a responsibility to come forward with information relevant to these transactions.  They benefit directly and indirectly from the existence of U.S. securities regulation, which in many instances both forces companies to use the services of gatekeepers and protects gatekeepers from liability.
  
  
   
• Quote:  Recent cases against accounting firms – including Arthur Andersen – are eroding that protection, but the other gatekeepers remain well insulated.  Gatekeepers are kept honest – at least in theory – by the threat of legal liability, which is virtually non-existent for some gatekeepers.  The capital markets would be more efficient if companies were not required by law to use particular gatekeepers (which only gives those firms market power), and if gatekeepers were subject to a credible threat of liability for their involvement in fraudulent transactions.  Congress should consider expanding the scope of securities fraud liability by making it clear that these gatekeepers will be liable for assisting companies in transactions designed to distort the economic reality of financial statements.
  
  
   
• Quote:  In a nutshell, it appears that some Enron employees used dummy accounts and rigged valuation methodologies to create false profit and loss entries for the derivatives Enron traded.  These false entries were systematic and occurred over several years, beginning as early as 1997.  They included not only the more esoteric financial instruments Enron began trading recently – such as fiber-optic bandwidth and weather derivatives – but also Enron’s very profitable trading operations in natural gas derivatives.
  
  
   
• Quote:  The difficult question is what to do about the gatekeepers.  They occupy a special place in securities regulation, and receive great benefits as a result.  Employees at gatekeeper firms are among the most highly-paid people in the world.  They have access to superior information and supposedly have greater expertise than average investors at deciphering that information.  Yet, with respect to Enron, the gatekeepers clearly did not do their job.

3.  What are some of Frank Partnoy’s best-known works?

Frank Partnoy, FIASCO: Blood in the Water on Wall Street (W. W. Norton & Company, 1997, ISBN 0393046222, 252 pages). 

This is the first of a somewhat repetitive succession of Partnoy’s “FIASCO” books that influenced my life.  The most important revelation from his insider’s perspective is that the most trusted firms on Wall Street and financial centers in other major cities in the U.S., that were once highly professional and trustworthy, excoriated the guts of integrity leaving a façade behind which crooks less violent than the Mafia but far more greedy took control in the roaring 1990s. 

After selling a succession of phony derivatives deals while at Morgan Stanley, Partnoy blew the whistle in this book about a number of his employer’s shady and outright fraudulent deals sold in rigged markets using bait and switch tactics.  Customers, many of them pension fund investors for schools and municipal employees, were duped into complex and enormously risky deals that were billed as safe as U.S. Treasury bonds.

His books have received mixed reviews, but I question some of the integrity of the reviewers from the investment banking industry who in some instances tried to whitewash some of the deals described by Partnoy.  His books have received a bit less praise than the book Liars Poker by Michael Lewis, but critics of Partnoy fail to give credit that Partnoy’s exposes preceded those of Lewis. 

Frank Partnoy, FIASCO: Guns, Booze and Bloodlust: the Truth About High Finance (Profile Books, 1998, 305 Pages)

Like his earlier books, some investment bankers and literary dilettantes who reviewed this book were critical of Partnoy and claimed that he misrepresented some legitimate structured financings.  However, my reading of the reviewers is that they were trying to lend credence to highly questionable offshore deals documented by Partnoy.  Be that as it may, it would have helped if Partnoy had been a bit more explicit in some of his illustrations.

Frank Partnoy, FIASCO: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader (Penguin, 1999, ISBN 0140278796, 283 pages). 

This is a blistering indictment of the unregulated OTC market for derivative financial instruments and the million and billion dollar deals conceived in investment banking.  Among other things, Partnoy describes Morgan Stanley’s annual drunken skeet-shooting competition organized by a “gun-toting strip-joint connoisseur” former combat officer (fanatic) who loved the motto:  “When derivatives are outlawed only outlaws will have derivatives.”  At that event, derivatives salesmen were forced to shoot entrapped bunnies between the eyes on the pretense that the bunnies were just like “defenseless animals” that were Morgan Stanley’s customers to be shot down even if they might eventually “lose a billion dollars on derivatives.”
 
This book has one of the best accounts of the “fiasco” caused almost entirely by the duping of Orange County ’s Treasurer (Robert Citron) by the unscrupulous Merrill Lynch derivatives salesman named Michael Stamenson. Orange County eventually lost over a billion dollars and was forced into bankruptcy.  Much of this was later recovered in court from Merrill Lynch.  Partnoy calls Citron and Stamenson “The Odd Couple,” which is also the title of Chapter 8 in the book.Frank Partnoy, Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets (Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, 2003, ISBN: 080507510-0, 477 pages)

Partnoy shows how corporations gradually increased financial risk and lost control over overly complex structured financing deals that obscured the losses and disguised frauds  pushed corporate officers and their boards into successive and ingenious deceptions." Major corporations such as Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom entered into enormous illegal corporate finance and accounting.  Partnoy documents the spread of this epidemic stage and provides some suggestions for restraining the disease.

The Siskel and Ebert of Financial Matters: Two Thumbs Down for the Credit Reporting Agencies" by Frank Partnoy, Washington University Law Quarterly, Volume 77, No. 3, 1999 --- http://ls.wustl.edu/WULQ/ 

4.  What are examples of related books that are somewhat more entertaining than Partnoy’s early books?

Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Playing the Money Markets (Coronet, 1999, ISBN 0340767006)

Lewis writes in Partnoy’s earlier whistleblower style with somewhat more intense and comic portrayals of the major players in describing the double dealing and break down of integrity on the trading floor of Salomon Brothers.

John Rolfe and Peter Troob, Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle (Warner Books, Incorporated, 2002, ISBN: 0446676950, 288 Pages)

This is a hilarious tongue-in-cheek account by Wharton and Harvard MBAs who thought they were starting out as stock brokers for $200,000 a year until they realized that they were on the phones in a bucket shop selling sleazy IPOs to unsuspecting institutional investors who in turn passed them along to widows and orphans.  They write. "It took us another six months after that to realize that we were, in fact, selling crappy public offerings to investors."

There are other books along a similar vein that may be more revealing and entertaining than the early books of Frank Partnoy, but he was one of the first, if not the first, in the roaring 1990s to reveal the high crime taking place behind the concrete and glass of Wall Street.  He was the first to anticipate many of the scandals that soon followed.  And his testimony before the U.S. Senate is the best concise account of the crime that transpired at Enron.  He lays the blame clearly at the feet of government officials (read that Wendy Gramm) who sold the farm when they deregulated the energy markets and opened the doors to unregulated OTC derivatives trading in energy.  That is when Enron really began bilking the public.