Mark-to-market accounting is itself illegal.
U.S. GAAP allows fair-value treatment in defined settings. The Enron cases attacked unsupported valuations and related-party hedges, not the existence of the standard.
The Houston trial ended the main criminal story. Appeals, the Andersen reversal, and twenty years of SOX practice are the aftermath.
Myths persist about what mark-to-market is and about whether Andersen was found innocent in a way that restores the firm.
Still open
- How to teach mark-to-market — Fair-value accounting remains legal and necessary in many books. The open pedagogical question is how to separate Enron's abuse from the tool.
- Audit-market concentration — The loss of Andersen left four global networks. Whether that concentration is safer is still a live regulatory debate.
- Lay's vacated verdict — Death abated the conviction. Historians treat the jury findings as a record of what was proved, not as a surviving judgment.
- Estate recoveries vs. employee harm — Creditor recoveries and employee 401(k) losses are different ledgers; they are still sometimes added as if they were one number.
- Honest-services after Skilling — How far federal prosecutors may go on intangible-rights theories remains a doctrinal argument the 2010 decision did not end.
Myth vs record
Arthur Andersen was exonerated and survived.
The Supreme Court reversed the conviction in 2005, but the firm had already collapsed as a public-company auditor in 2002.
Kenneth Lay's conviction still stands.
Lay died before sentencing. Under the abatement doctrine the district court vacated the conviction.
Enron was only a California energy-crisis story.
California trading is part of the history; the criminal core in Houston was corporate accounting, SPEs, and false statements to investors and banks.
Local notes
Journal footnotes and the 2001 scoop cycle
English-language business desks learned to read related-party footnotes after Enron. That habit still shows up in later coverage of SPEs and non-GAAP earnings.
Fortune to Hollywood
The magazine-to-book-to-film pipeline made Enron a narrative property in U.S. and U.K. media, sometimes at the expense of the Powers Report's dryer map.
SOX as a London comparison
FT writers still use Enron when comparing U.S. certification rules with U.K. Combined Code and later audit-reform papers -- a transatlantic teaching pair.
The aftermath is a statute that still binds issuers, an audit market with one fewer firm, and a name that means the earnings were the story.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.