Even before joining Enron, Skilling had made a very strange demand. His new business, he told Lay, had to use a different type of accounting from the one ordinarily used by the natural-gas industry. Rather than using historical-cost accounting like everyone else, he wanted Enron Finance be able to use what’s known as mark-to-market accounting. This was so important to him—“a lay-my-body-across-the-tracks issue,” he later called it—that he actually told Lay he would not join Enron and build his new division unless he could use mark-to-market accounting.
