what the new yorker said, was that enron didn't hide anything, obviously i'm only a sophomore in college so feel free to correct me if any of this looks wrong to any of you, but that all of revenue for enron was coming on deals that they'd get paid for when the contract starts, 2016 and the like. And also was their heavy reliance on SPE's. Which i'm basically paraphrasing as i'm reading : for a high money loan and to bypass high interest, they set up a partnership called the SPE, the bank lends money to the partnership, and it gives it to the business. It does not show up on balance sheets and many companies do this. Enron got in trouble by not getting SPE loans with deals it was sure to recoup on, it was using them on less reliable deals, which is where it got in trouble.
now here was the point of the article, all of this info was reported and available, unfortunately all of this was hundreds of thousands of pages, literally, and would take an expert to figure it out over weeks. As the writer goes on to say, the judge accused enron of not releasing the info in a way we could understand, yet there were summaries of summaries of summaries and it was still 200 pages that was just as complicated to understand.
Now, i should clarify at this point, that he is not saying enron didn't do anything wrong, what Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote the article, is saying is that business deals are getting so complicated that we need to change the way we look at companies to prevent such a failure. As he pointed out, if we were to look at their tax returns we saw that they weren't paying any income tax, because they weren't making any money.
it was really fascinating, i encourage you all to try and find it.