Yet the power-trading industry's profits are often based on such guesses as a result of mark-to-market accounting.

Document destruction, though, was as simple to understand as mark-to-market accounting was complex.

"I don't think we should conclude from that we should abandon mark-to-market accounting."

Through mark-to-market accounting, the report says, "Enron often recognized earnings before these activities generated any cash."

But the profits would be well worth it, executives said, because in the process, El Paso had to switch to mark-to-market accounting.

Moreover, some of the largest power traders still attribute an uncomfortably large percentage of net income to mark-to-market accounting.

In their much happier recent past, the energy traders could execute such long-term deals and book the profits from them immediately, under mark-to-market accounting.

The numbers are likely to change under the influence of the accounting board's new rule, which limits certain uses of mark-to-market accounting.

"What you see is that if we had used this mark-to-market accounting, our profits in fiscal year '93 would have been significantly higher than we reported."

The trading desk used mark-to-market accounting, a system in which a potential long-term stream of revenue can be booked immediately and counted toward net profits.