Business Research Ethics
Jessica Vinson
University of Phoenix
RES/351
Instructor: April Summerford

The purpose of my paper is to discuss the business ethics of a company that is said to be one of America’s biggest fraud case. The article that I found was about a company called Enron. The article discusses Enron’s business practices and the unethical research used in order to expand the business that caused many lives to be damaged, and many futures ruined.
Ethics is defined as rules of behavior that is based on a person’s belief of what is good and bad ("Merriam-Webster", N.D.). Everyone has some kind of code of ethics that they go by day to day, but everyone’s code of ethics is different especially when it comes to business. Many times are the business world people will do things that according to their code is wrong, but because they feel pressure from their job they will bend that code in order to get the job done.
Due to the economy growing unethical business practices has been growing as well and although unethical business practices is not something new it is something that is becoming more common. A common unethical practice is to alter the company’s research results or alter research from the company. Enron was an America energy, commodities, and service company that employed thousands of people and was a major electricity and natural gas company (“Enron 10 years later,” 2012). One of Enron’s unethical practices was to build power plants in different areas then the company would then take those future earnings from those plants. The company would then identify those earnings as current assets. Enron would then be first to sell future stocks for their company. Using their future earnings in order to bring the price of their stock up and then when the price of their stock increased they would then sell, this was just another unethical research practice. This company’s practices hurt many people; most were the employees of Enron and even the companies the Enron purchased such and PG&E (“Enron 10 years later,” 2012). Many of the employees invested money in the company’s 401K, invested into retirement accounts, and purchased too much stock from Enron were hurt the most by the company. This company was the cause of the California blackouts back in 2000; this happened because of Enron stock traders were selling electricity meant for California. The residents of California were then paying for electricity that they paid for but was already sold. Enron had an artificial storage that caused prices for electricity to skyrocket.
So many people were hurt by this companies unethical behavior especially those who were employed there or bought the company’s stock. These people were swindled out of so much money because of a few bad apples at Enron. Due to the greed of these select few the company ended up going bankrupt and those who were involved in all the unethical dealings