Editing Enron (section)

===Accounting practices===
Enron used a variety of deceptive and fraudulent tactics and accounting practices to cover its fraud in reporting Enron's financial information. Special-purpose entities were created to mask significant liabilities from Enron's financial statements. These entities made Enron seem more profitable than it was, and created a dangerous spiral in which, each quarter, corporate officers would have to perform more and more financial deception to create the illusion of billions of dollars in profit while the company was actually losing money.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.forbes.com/2002/01/15/0115enron.html|title="Enron the Incredible"|date=January 15, 2002|newspaper=Forbes}}</ref> This practice increased their stock price to new levels, at which point the executives began to work on [[insider trading|insider information]] and trade millions of dollars worth of Enron stock. The executives and insiders at Enron knew about the offshore accounts that were hiding losses for the company; the investors, however, did not. Chief Financial Officer [[Andrew Fastow]] directed the team that created the off-books companies and manipulated the deals to provide himself, his family, and his friends with hundreds of millions of dollars in guaranteed revenue, at the expense of the corporation for which he worked and its stockholders.{{citation needed|date=January 2012}}

[[File:Arthur Andersen Witnesses.jpg|thumb|Arthur Andersen employees, from left, Michael C. Odom, Nancy Temple, Dorsey Baskin Jr., and C.E. Andrews are sworn in as they appear before a House Committee on January 24, 2002.]]

In 1999, Enron initiated EnronOnline, an Internet-based trading operation, which was used by virtually every energy company in the United States. By promoting the company's aggressive investment strategy, Enron's president and chief operating officer Jeffrey Skilling helped make Enron the biggest wholesaler of gas and electricity, trading over $27&nbsp;billion per quarter. The corporation's financial claims, however, had to be accepted at face value. Under Skilling, Enron adopted [[mark-to-market accounting]], in which anticipated future profits from any deal were tabulated as if currently real. Thus, Enron could record gains from what over time might turn out to be losses, as the company's fiscal health became secondary to manipulating its stock price during the so-called [[Tech boom]].<ref>{{Cite book|title=The encyclopedia of the industrial revolution in world history|others=Hendrickson, Kenneth E.|year= 2014|isbn=978-0-8108-8888-3|location=Lanham|oclc=913956423}}</ref> But when a company's success is measured by undocumented financial statements, actual balance sheets are inconvenient. Indeed, Enron's unscrupulous actions were often gambles to keep the deception going and so increase the stock price. An advancing price meant a continued infusion of investor capital on which debt-ridden Enron in large part subsisted (much like a financial "pyramid" or "[[Ponzi scheme]]"). Attempting to maintain the illusion, Skilling verbally attacked Wall Street analyst [[Highfields Capital Management#Business|Richard Grubman]],<ref name="million">{{cite news|url=https://money.cnn.com/2006/04/10/news/newsmakers/enron_trial/index.htm|title=Skilling comes out swinging|last=Pasha|first=Shaheen|date=April 10, 2006|publisher=Money/CNN}}</ref> who questioned Enron's unusual accounting practice during a recorded conference telephone call. When Grubman complained that Enron was the only company that could not release a balance sheet along with its earnings statements, Skilling replied, "Well, thank you very much, we appreciate that&nbsp;... asshole." Though the comment was met with dismay and astonishment by press, Wall Street analysts and public,<ref name=mclean/>{{rp|325–6}} it became an inside joke among many Enron employees, mocking Grubman for his perceived meddling rather than Skilling's offensiveness.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x319539|title=Skilling to skeptical financial analyst, "Thanks asshole" – Democratic Underground}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.cnbc.com/2015/02/12/clean-up-your-act-musk-teslas-a-total-disaster.html|title=Clean up your act Musk, Tesla's a total disaster!|website=[[CNBC]]|date=February 12, 2015|publisher= [[Mad Money]]|author=Stevenson, Abigail}} Enron named.</ref>