Enron is a large energy trading company that allegedly committed massive fraud. Enron’s primary method of committing fraud was to record liabilities in related partnerships, then known as special purpose entities that were not consolidated, or combined, with Enron’s financial statements. Company executives have maintained that they did not know about these massive off-balance-sheet liabilities, which have been estimated to be several billion dollars.
As a fraud investigator, how would you go about finding the existence of these liabilities and partnerships?