The Enron Scandal

Paper Summary:

The collapse of Enron, which represents the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, led to thousands of employees losing their life savings in 401(k) plans tied to the company's stock. Arthur Andersen, Enron's auditing firm, has been indicted for obstruction of justice for allegedly shredding thousands of Enron documents. This paper explores to what extent a business disaster could have been averted by using modern database technology such as knowledge management tools or data warehousing applications to create a safer working environment.

From the Paper:

"But what could have prevented so many individuals from losing their life savings? Is there any database application that could have prevented that? Probably not from a user perspective but certainly for an auditing perspective. Data mining allows for the extraction of particular information based on defined goals. Once the attributes are created, the user can extract hidden predictive information from large databases. In the case of Enron's auditing practices, perhaps a data-mining tool would have been able to unearth hidden information. Remember, data mining is data-driven, not user or verification-driven. A user formats a theory about a possible relation in the database and converts this hypothesis into a query."

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