Enron

Enron Corporation was an American energy, commodities and services company based in Houston, Texas. It was led by Kenneth Lay and developed in 1985 via a merger between Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, both relatively small regional companies at the time of the merger. Before its bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, Enron employed approximately 20,600 staff and was a major electricity, natural gas, communications, and pulp and paper company, with claimed revenues of nearly $101 billion during 2000. Fortune named Enron "America's Most Innovative Company" for six consecutive years.

At the end of 2001, it was revealed that Enron's reported financial condition was sustained by an institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud, known since as the Enron scandal. Enron became synonymous with willful, institutional fraud and systemic corruption. The scandal brought into question the accounting practices and activities of many corporations in the United States and was a factor in the enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. It affected the greater business world by causing, together with the even larger fraudulent bankruptcy of WorldCom, the dissolution of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, which had been Enron and WorldCom's main auditor, and coconspirator in the fraud for years.