{"id":80,"date":"2024-09-06T16:46:14","date_gmt":"2024-09-06T16:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/financialaccounting\/chapter\/why-it-matters-accounting-principles\/"},"modified":"2024-09-09T16:51:38","modified_gmt":"2024-09-09T16:51:38","slug":"why-it-matters-accounting-principles","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/financialaccounting\/chapter\/why-it-matters-accounting-principles\/","title":{"raw":"Why It Matters: Accounting Principles","rendered":"Why It Matters: Accounting Principles"},"content":{"raw":"

Why learn about accounting standards and practices in the United States?<\/h2>\r\nImagine that you work for a large energy broker and you make a good sum of money as a trader. Your job is to monitor energy prices around the nation, buying energy shares when the price is low, and reselling them when the price goes up. It sounds more complicated than it is. The \u201cshares\u201d are really just little contracts that give you rights to the energy when you want it. Once you get the hang of it, you\u2019re making a six-figure income, plus you receive a bonus every year in the form of stock (ownership) in the company, and all your retirement savings are also invested in stock in the company. The price of that stock keeps going up and up as the company makes more and more money, and so you hold on to your stock and acquire more each year. It looks like you may be able to retire early, until one day a reporter starts asking questions about the financial statements, like, \u201cHow do you calculate revenue?\u201d and \u201cWhy are these assets worth so much?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe CEO of the company is evasive, and that leads to more and more questions. The CEO resigns and Federal investigators show up. Less than a year later the company is bankrupt, you are out of a job, and your stock is worthless.\r\n\r\n\"Enron'sThat\u2019s the story of one of the most notorious financial disasters in modern history: the Enron scandal. Enron was claiming revenues before they were even earned, and marking up mostly worthless assets to astronomical values. That was happening at the turn of the century\u2014not the 20th century, but the 21st. Enron went bankrupt in 2001.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s not that there weren\u2019t standards in place that would have alerted investors to the problems. Those standards, called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), were well established. Enron executives just chose to ignore them, and the public bought the fa\u00e7ade for years, buying stock and driving the price up and up until the bubble burst. When the stock became worthless, thousands of people lost their life\u2019s savings in their retirement plans and investors suffered $74 billion in losses. In addition, the largest accounting firm in the world went down with Enron, after having attested to the validity of those financial accounting reports for years.\r\n\r\n