This thesis concerns the collapse of Houston based Enron Corporation and its ongoing economic, political and legal implications. Specifically, I investigate spaces of corporate fraud to broadly ask, how is fraud located in the varied spatial contexts of the firm? My goal is to demonstrate that the corporation is contingent upon social, cultural and material relationships across space. In this regard, I explore three distinct corporate spaces. They include (1) financial statements, where I discuss Enron’s financial performances in two spatial contexts, what the public saw, and what went on in private, (2) the bodies of workers, where I consider the gendered exposure of Enron’s fraud to the public, and (3) the spaces of the courtroom where I document how the corporation, as a non-bodied entity, became embodied in a courtroom context. In each case, I demonstrate how fraud is situated differently, and in each case, I suggest the implications of corporate fraud play out with differing results for those involved. The research for this thesis involved an archeological and ethnographic approach towards gathering and analyzing narratives around Enron’s downfall. This means I rely on financial documents and other important papers published by the former company, semi-structured interviews with former Enron employees, interviews with key media persons documenting the Enron story, participant-observation of the criminal trial against former CEOs (Chief Executive Officer) Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, media analysis of news articles and other popular culture texts, and finally, journaling. Far from being solely a homo economicus, a rational economic actor guided by capitalist imperatives to extract profit, my data suggests that the corporation is constituted through cultural, social and material agents that are unstable and breakdown. With this, I suggest the use of a new metaphor for the corporation, the corporation as a body. The body I conceive is conceptually drawn from feminist post-structural theory. It is open, porous and embodied. This new metaphor enables me to draw on the corporation’s diverse embodiments as important constitutive moments of corporate fraud.

This thesis concerns the collapse of Houston based Enron Corporation and its ongoing economic, political and legal implications. Specifically, I investigate spaces of corporate fraud to broadly ask, how is fraud located in the varied spatial contexts of the firm? My goal is to demonstrate that the corporation is contingent upon social, cultural and material relationships across space. In this regard, I explore three distinct corporate spaces. They include (1) financial statements, where I discuss Enron’s financial performances in two spatial contexts, what the public saw, and what went on in private, (2) the bodies of workers, where I consider the gendered exposure of Enron’s fraud to the public, and (3) the spaces of the courtroom where I document how the corporation, as a non-bodied entity, became embodied in a courtroom context. In each case, I demonstrate how fraud is situated differently, and in each case, I suggest the implications of corporate fraud play out with differing results for those involved. The research for this thesis involved an archeological and ethnographic approach towards gathering and analyzing narratives around Enron’s downfall. This means I rely on financial documents and other important papers published by the former company, semi-structured interviews with former Enron employees, interviews with key media persons documenting the Enron story, participant-observation of the criminal trial against former CEOs (Chief Executive Officer) Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, media analysis of news articles and other popular culture texts, and finally, journaling. Far from being solely a homo economicus, a rational economic actor guided by capitalist imperatives to extract profit, my data suggests that the corporation is constituted through cultural, social and material agents that are unstable and breakdown. With this, I suggest the use of a new metaphor for the corporation, the corporation as a body. The body I conceive is conceptually drawn from feminist post-structural theory. It is open, porous and embodied. This new metaphor enables me to draw on the corporation’s diverse embodiments as important constitutive moments of corporate fraud.

Master-Arbeit Univ. St. Gallen, 2006.

Bachelor-Arbeit Univ. St. Gallen, 2006.

This thesis concerns the collapse of Houston based Enron Corporation and its ongoing economic, political and legal implications. Specifically, I investigate spaces of corporate fraud to broadly ask, how is fraud located in the varied spatial contexts of the firm? My goal is to demonstrate that the corporation is contingent upon social, cultural and material relationships across space. In this regard, I explore three distinct corporate spaces. They include (1) financial statements, where I discuss Enron’s financial performances in two spatial contexts, what the public saw, and what went on in private, (2) the bodies of workers, where I consider the gendered exposure of Enron’s fraud to the public, and (3) the spaces of the courtroom where I document how the corporation, as a non-bodied entity, became embodied in a courtroom context. In each case, I demonstrate how fraud is situated differently, and in each case, I suggest the implications of corporate fraud play out with differing results for those involved. The research for this thesis involved an archeological and ethnographic approach towards gathering and analyzing narratives around Enron’s downfall. This means I rely on financial documents and other important papers published by the former company, semi-structured interviews with former Enron employees, interviews with key media persons documenting the Enron story, participant-observation of the criminal trial against former CEOs (Chief Executive Officer) Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, media analysis of news articles and other popular culture texts, and finally, journaling. Far from being solely a homo economicus, a rational economic actor guided by capitalist imperatives to extract profit, my data suggests that the corporation is constituted through cultural, social and material agents that are unstable and breakdown. With this, I suggest the use of a new metaphor for the corporation, the corporation as a body. The body I conceive is conceptually drawn from feminist post-structural theory. It is open, porous and embodied. This new metaphor enables me to draw on the corporation’s diverse embodiments as important constitutive moments of corporate fraud. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

Seminario para optar al título de Ingeniero Comercial / En los últimos años, y sobre todo en las escuelas de negocios, se ha venido incorporando un sistema que intenta explicar la realidad con la realidad, es decir, un método por el cual el alumno adquiera los conocimientos teóricos que le expliquen de que manera se comportan las cosas, pero con la salvedad que los esta aprendiendo en la práctica. Nos referimos al sistema de resolución de casos, en donde, el profesor orienta a los alumnos y los insta a participar de la discusión de cómo se llegó a resolver por alguna empresa en particular, algún tipo de problema ya fuese financiero, económico, o de cualquier otra naturaleza. Es por esta razón y motivado por nuestro profesor guía, quien posee una vasta experiencia en la publicaciones de casos chilenos, que he desarrollado dos temas: el primero trata de una de las quiebras más grandes que han ocurrido en el último tiempo, la de Enron Corp., la cual fue provocada principalmente por una serie de artificios contables, la avaricia de los principales administrativos, los vacíos en la regulación del sector de este tipo de empresa , etc. El segundo caso trata de la quiebra de una empresa chilena, CRAV S.A., la cual fue de gran envergadura para la época en que se produjo (en la década de los ochenta). Esta fue provocada principalmente por la caída en los precios en el mercado azucarero, el cual era muy volátil. Los administradores, a pesar de conocer estas características de este mercado, no se protegieron adecuadamente.

As organizations and government agencies work diligently to detect financial irregularities, malfeasance, fraud and criminal activities through intercepted communication, there is an increasing interest in devising an automated model/tool for deception detection. We build on Pennebaker's empirical model which suggests that deception in text leaves a linguistic signature characterised by changes in frequency of four categories of words: first-person pronouns, exclusive words, negative emotion words, and action words. By applying the model to the Enron email dataset and using an unsupervised matrix-decomposition technique, we explore the differential use of these cue-words/categories in deception detection. Instead of focusing on the predictive power of the individual cue-words, we construct a descriptive model which helps us to understand the multivariate profile of deception based on several linguistic dimensions and highlights the qualitative differences between deceptive and truthful communication. This descriptive model can not only help detect unusual and deceptive communication, but also possibly rank messages along a scale of relative deceptiveness (for instance from strategic negotiation and spin to deception and blatant lying). The model is unintrusive, requires minimal human intervention and, by following the defined pre-processing steps it may be applied to new datasets from different domains. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2007-11-28 18:10:30.45

Bachelor-Arbeit Univ. St. Gallen, 2004.

The goal of this diploma thesis "Aggressive earnings management in publicly traded companies and its impact on share prices" is to connect an interesting topic of earnings management, which is part of a wider group -- financial fraud, with specific impact on the capital market. This thesis includes identification and quantification of the impact on a well known case of corporate fraud -- Enron. First part of the thesis describes and discusses the topic earnings management including its definition, motivation, tests, connected risk and legislation. Second part discusses share valuation techniques -- relative and absolute methods, which will be used in the last part. Last part of the thesis, using the well known case of earnings management -- Enron, quantifies the extent of earnings management, its impact on share prices and total damages caused to investors.

The aim of this work is the analysis of accounting scandals that took place at beginning of the 21st century. It describes the role that played audit firm in this context. It focuses on current and future situation in the audit market.