The company lacked the kind of sophisticated cash-management systems that big companies required. McMahon couldn’t even find a maturity schedule showing when all Enron’s debt would need to be repaid—a basic tool in corporate finance. In fact, with all the tangled off-balance-sheet machinations—obscuring what obligations were truly Enron’s, obscuring even what was truly debt—no one could immediately tell McMahon how much money Enron owed.
