Dear Dopers,
Who was the first and/or most significant whistle-blower to come clean about Enron?
Love,
p.s. wikipedia’s Enron article did not appear to contain this info
p.p.s I’ve come across the name Sherron Watkins but I’ve read she only wrote internal memos rather than complaints to the outside world
I think Sherron Watkins is considered to be the earliest most important.
Her wiki link is Sherron Watkins - Wikipedia
Sorry, just read that you posted her name in your OP.
Coincidentally, I just started reading the most excellent Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story which is a very detailed history of the whole affair, starting in the early 90’s.
It’s amazing how much of the debacle was due not just to greed, but sheer incompetence. When Andy Fastow was made CFO, he didn’t even understand how financial instruments like options and derivatives worked. I think he started committing fraud just to show up all the smarter people in the company. 
From the Wiki article on Sherron Watkins that samclem linked:
*It has been remarked that her actions cannot be considered whistleblowing in a strict sense, because she only wrote a concerned internal email message to Enron CEO Kenneth Lay warning him of potential whistleblowers in the company and pointing out that there were misstatements in the financial reports. Her memo did not reach the public until five months after it was written. Forbes Magazine argued that, for this reason, her actions did not constitute whistleblowing and actually helped provide legal cover for Lay.
*
So the question remains: if Ms. Watkins didn’t provide the info to the outside world, how did it escape?
Here’s an interview with Lynn Brewer, author of Confessions of an Enron Executive: A Whistleblowers Story
My understanding of it is that it all came out after the collapse, not as the result of a whistle-blower. The collapse was precipitated by creditors, specifically buyers of commercial paper. Enron suddenly found that no one in the market wanted to buy its short-term debt, which it needed to sell to maintain cash flow. Enron then began to draw on its revolving credit, which is like blood in shark-infested water. It became apparent to the financial markets that Enron had no money and tons of debt.
Malcolm Gladwell did a piece on how the Enron thing came about in the New Yorker. Interesting reading.
Link to New Yorker article here and blog entry (continuing from article) here .
Enron published it.
Seriously. The information about the Special Purpose Entities were to be found in the regularly filed Annual Reports, proxies, and various other regulatory filings required by the SEC all throughout the 1990s. For example, a 1999 proxy filing by Enron stated flatly that Andrew Fastow was the “senior executive” who was running the off-book SPE’s, which in that year was responsible for 40% of all Enron earnings.
However, the financial press and Clinton’s SEC could be, at best, charitably described as cheerleaders, not regulators. There was a boom on, nobody wanted to spoil the party, and since earnings were going up up up, and since we were in a “New Economy”, such paltry things like financial statements were ignored… even disdained.
The first article that can be determined to be the first true chink in the Enron armor was written in February 19th, 2001 by Fortune magazine writer Bethany MacLean entitled “IS ENRON OVERPRICED?” In it, she essentially asked the question “How does Enron make its money?”
However, it really wasn’t until Skilling started to crack in March 2001 that people really began nosing around. Calling a man who ran a hedge fund an “asshole” in a quarterly earnings conference call didn’t help, nor did his increasingly erratic behavior in the weeks prior to his resignation. When he did resign, he screwed the pooch by first insisting it was for personal reasons, only to mess up the tale by openly admitting to the Wall Street Journal that he resigned because of depression caused by the sinking stock price (which confused the reporters… until they realized the pressure on Skilling was excaberated by the impact the falling prices was having on the entire Enron financial house of cards).
By then, with a falling market, accounting problems at other companies that were appearing at the same time, and a new SEC chief, the press started doing what it stopped doing right about the time the Netscape IPO occurred: it started being business watchdogs again. They picked up those old financial statements and began reading them.
And it took about a month for it all to fall apart.
I find the Enron story to be fascinating, one of those elephants that everybody describes differently. A poster above mentioned Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools, but another honest (and completely opposing) take on the story can be found in MacLean’s The Smartest Guys in the Room. (I tend towards the Eichenwald version: it tends to ring true with my experiences in business in general, and I trust the writer more given my reading of their other works.)
I’m so glad I wrote the previous post prior to reading the blog, else I would’ve felt as if I lifted every word I wrote.
Nice when somebody agrees with you. 
Bolding mine, for emphasis.
So it was Bush’s fault? 
That’s right. Those 29 days in office really did the trick on those 1997-2000 financial statements that the SEC accepted… and then ignored.
From the same interview:
Note the dates. Then she goes on to say…
Harvey Pitt was appointed SEC Chairman in August 2001. If this woman didn’t want to go to a “Bush appointed SEC”, then she waited until after the collapse began to become a whistle-blower.
But I doubt she even did as much as she says, because not even people she claims are on her side have no record of her attempting to contact them.
So… she was involved in these illegal transactions for three years and does nothing. She waits until the collapse is imminent, avoids the SEC and DOJ because she “doesn’t trust them”, and then sends faxes and emails to one Senator who claims to have never received them.
Whistleblowers… they sure don’t make 'em like they used to.