Enpon?

Perhaps not, but with the revelation of questionable accounting practices just weeks after the stock went public, the SEC may soon decide that Groupon's got some 'splainin' to do.

We remember Enron. We may not want to. We may not have given it much thought since, oh, say, 2004 or so. But we remember it.

I won't rehash it in it's woeful entirety here. Read Kurt Eichenwald's exceptionally researched chronicle Conspiracy of Lies for a play-by-play of how a misanthropic little shit named Andrew Fastow bilked thousands of people out of billions of dollars using an accounting trick, a method called “mark-to-market,” that, I have to admit, even today I'm still completely incredulous was ever legal. And how his boss, CEO Jeffrey Skilling acted like he had no idea what was going on right under his nose. And how his boss, chairman of the board Kenneth Lay, openly lied to his employees over and over again about the company's health while secretly selling off his shares and then a few years later escaped prosecution and being chased by angry mobs with torches and pitchforks through the streets of Houston by simply having a heart attack and dying. It's a fascinating story of corporate malfeasance that brought down Arthur Andersen, rendered Merrill Lynch stark naked before the SEC, and reached so far throughout the entire American business community that, naturally, no one outside of the of Enron and the aforementioned financial firms was ever taken to task for any of it.

Or, if reading a 700-plus-page book is not convenient for you at the moment, check out a 100-minute movie called Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Based on a book co-authored by Fortune reporter Bethany McLean, who had the temerity to question Enron's godlike status in corporate America back in '01 with an article entitled “Is Enron Overpriced?”, the film, while nowhere near as comprehensive as Eichenwald's book, does give a worthwhile overview of the pondscum in expensive suits who remorselessly destroyed countless lives and shut down electrical grids and shut off dialysis machines throughout California in 2000 while sitting in their air-conditioned skyscraper in Houston, laughing about it and saying, “Fuck em.”

And this all has what to do with Groupon? I'm getting to it.

Like zillions of other bloggers, I caught this evening's segment of 60 Minutes on Groupon and its wunderkind founder/CEO Andrew Mason. It's laudable that he took a clever idea and turned it into a company that employs 10,000 people right here in the U.S., and then turned that into an IPO worth billions. I'm not too proud to say I'm envious of such ingenuity and productivity in a market without a tangible product, and while I'm a bit skeptical of the company's continued success given its seemingly unsustainable business model, I do wish Mr. Mason and his minions well.

But towards the end of the segment, Lesley Stahl changed gears a bit and noted that the company's accounting practices might be viewed by some as a bit suspicious. How else to explain reporting a $60 million revenue in 2010 that, in fact, covered up an actual $420 million loss?

How further to explain such financial reporting in the year prior to Groupon's explosive IPO, when a company's past and potential revenues are absolutely critical elements in determining how the open market will value the newly-issued stock (quite highly, as it turned out, on day one, but not quite as much in the weeks since).

And finally, how to make it clear to investors that such creative accounting is not a harbinger of things to come, only instead of masking a $60 million loss, some disciples of Fastow, Michael Milken or the like might decide they can get away with masking a loss of $60 billion by reporting outsize revenue, profits and growth? After all, it's not like there's anyone in Washington actually protecting the public against such malfeasance and, let's face it, outright fraud. Congressional Republicans will be blocking every nominee for the top post at the newly established (and as yet unnamed) federal consumer protection agency until they can place someone with the impeccable credentials of a Michael Brown. Or until they can make everyone, including the White House, forget that such an agency was ever meant to exist in the first place.

In the world of high finance and crony capitalism, $60 million is not really that much money. Heck, $420 million isn't even that much money. But we've still yet to become so jaded by the endless barrage of corporate fraud anecdotes that we wouldn't consider a $60 billion gain or a $420 billion loss to be pretty darn cataclysmic. Heck, we even managed to balk when Bernie Ebbers initially said he “misplaced” $7.5 billion of WorldCom's money, and that he later had to revise that number upward to roughly $11 billion because of an “oversight.” Or maybe that was just because he threw his wife a birthday party at which giant Statue-of-David ice sculptures pissed high-end French champagne and paid for it out of the company's petty cash account. It's not that we can't forgive a little fraud now and then, but we are concerned about how one specifically misuses the embezzled funds.

Mr. Mason, the latest CEO to be dubbed a maverick and a renegade because he appears to have a sense of humor and doesn't wear a tie to the office, simply claimed that there was no intent. He and his executives were not seeking to do evil with their accounting practices. They are simply young and somewhat naïve, and they made some mistakes in the company's favor, mistakes from which they will surely learn, mistakes they will be careful not to make in the future. Or so we are left to hope.

I admit, an awful lot of people enjoy saving $10 here and $30 there when trying out local businesses and, more with recent developments in Groupon's offerings, saving quite a bit more when traveling to exotic locales. I myself have tried a nearby bakery and have gotten an oil change and a shiatsu massage.

But knowing what I now know, I wonder if these welcome little local savings might someday lead, through a sequence and confluence of events, to another $800 billion national bailout. I wouldn't enjoy that. Things are already pretty tight for me. The job creators aren't creating enough jobs, even with all the tax savings and regulatory variances they received during the Bush years, to ensure that even an old, fat, crusty, technologically-challenged slacker with a journalism degree can find one. So no, such savings would not, in my estimation, be worth enduring billions more in malfeasance an fraud.

Enpon?

No, not yet. And perhaps not ever. But Andy Fastow gets out of prison in 2014. And he may decide to bring his next great idea in financial wizardry to Andrew Mason's door. This time, let's maybe keep our eyes open.