Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies Vol. 6, No. 4 (2003) 433–440 c  World Scientific Publishing Co. and Center for PBBEF Research Before the Enron Collapse: What Corporate CFOs Around the World Said About the Status of Accounting and Disclosure Practices James R. Barth Auburn University, and Milken Institute, 1250 Fourth Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401, USA jbarth@milkeninstitute.org Susanne Trimbath * and Glenn Yago † Milken Institute, 1250 Fourth Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401, USA * strimbath@milkeninstitute.org † gyago@milkeninstitute.org Corporate Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) in many countries at different levels of development and in various parts of the world considered financial statement disclosure and corporate corruption to be serious corporate problems long before the Enron debacle. This paper presents the results of a survey of CFOs conducted across 40 countries during the fall of 2000 and the spring of 2001. Most of the respondents, including those in the United States, considered the lack of adequate disclosure of information by companies to be a bigger issue than either corrupt business practices or a lack of effective accounting guidelines. Only in the United Kingdom did more CFOs consider the lack of effective accounting guidelines to be an issue of more concern than the lack of disclosure. Keywords : Accounting transparency; disclosure; corrupt business practices. The collapse of Enron in December 2001 has generated considerable contro- versy over corporate accounting practices and the quality of financial infor- mation disclosed to investors. The ongoing concern and associated volatility in stock prices underscores the importance of transparency to the efficient functioning of financial markets. Indeed, the President and the Congress re- sponded to the resulting turmoil with the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of July 2002. The new law attempts to increase the transparency of corporate financial * Corresponding author. 433