How the Enron Scandal Changed American Business Forever

It’s the kind of historic anniversary few people really want to remember.

The company’s collapse sent ripples through the financial system, with the government introducing a set of stringent regulations for auditors, accountants and senior executives, huge requirements for record keeping, and criminal penalties for securities laws violations. In turn, that has led in part to less choice for U.S. stock investors, and lower participation in stock ownership by individuals.

Immediately following the bankruptcy, Congress worked on the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, which was meant to hold senior executives responsible for listed company financial statements. CEOs and CFOs are now held personally accountable for the truth of what goes on the income statement and balance sheet. The bill passed in 2002 and has been with us since. But it has also drawn harsh criticisms.

The direct result of the legislation was that public companies got dumped with a load of bureaucratic form-filling, and executives would be less likely to take on entrepreneurial risks, Hanke says. There is also much ambiguity in the law about what is or what isn’t allowed and what are the ultimate consequences of non-compliance. “You don’t know what you are facing in terms of penalties, so you back off of everything risky,” he says.

Companies now wait under they are far larger before going public than they did before the Sarbanes-Oxley rules were introduced. Yahoo! went public with a market capitalization of $848 million in April 1996, and in 1995 Netscape got a valuation of $2.9 billion. Compare that to the $82 billion IPO valuation for ride share company Uber in 2019, or Facebook $104 billion IPO value in 2012.

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