Managing Director – Richard L. (Rick) Carson
Rick Carson is an energy industry veteran with over 35 years of experience in all aspects of accounting, finance and risk management. Rick is a graduate of Oklahoma City University with Bachelors and Masters degrees in Business Administration and holds professional designation as a Certified Public Accountant. Some highlights of Rick’s career include 15 years spent with Gulf Oil Corporation where he rose to the position of Division Comptroller of the South and East Offshore Division in New Orleans. Rick was often a spokesperson for Gulf on oil and gas accounting matters and provided industry testimony related to royalty accounting to the Linowes Commission in 1982, which recommended the creation of the Minerals Management Services to the Secretary of the Interior.
In 1987, Rick joined the newly created Enron Corp in Houston and in 1993 he became part of Enron Finance Corp., which began providing large amounts of capital to energy and other industries. Rick was tasked with the responsibility to develop a due diligence program for Enron that was thorough but efficient enough to keep pace with the huge number of transactions that were being generated by dealmakers. In addition to due diligence, as Vice President of Risk Assessment and Control, Rick was given responsibility for portfolio management and compliance where he began to be concerned about the performance of a number of Enron’s portfolio assets. Rick’s concerns turned into a comprehensive investigation, which he summarized into an executive presentation entitled “Investment Portfolio Lessons Learned”. This presentation warned Enron’s top management, over a year in advance of Enron’s collapse, of a number of practices that were putting Enron’s merchant investment portfolio at risk. Unfortunately, the “Lessons Learned” presentation was not taken to heart by Enron management but was used by government prosecutors as a key piece of evidence to obtain convictions in the trial of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay.
After Enron declared bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, the majority of Enron employees were terminated. Rick was asked to stay on in the role of Vice President of Accounting and Controls to develop post-bankruptcy controls and procedures that would assure the creditors that the liquidation of Enron’s assets would be properly controlled including cash disbursements. The creditor’s representatives and the SEC vetted Rick’s qualifications for this role. In addition, Rick was given the responsibility to develop an in-house litigation support function to develop the complex accounting documentation necessary to pursue litigation against banks and other financial institutions that aided and abetted the Enron fraud. In connection with this role, Rick provided testimony as a 30(b)(6) corporate witness for Enron on several occasions including crime insurance policy litigation that resulted in one of the largest crime policy settlements in history. In total, Rick was involved in providing litigation support for cases that resulted in an additional $7.1 billion in recovery for Enron’s creditors. Rick’s last role before leaving Enron in 2008 was to negotiate the liquidation of Enron’s captive insurance programs with three major insurance carriers.
As Managing Director and co-founder of Carson Rollins, LLC, Rick will use his extensive experience and organizational skills to provide top quality professional services to clients on a cost effective basis.