On the Edge: WorldCom's Whistleblower

In March 2002. when WorldCom was struggling to coordinate and integrate the complex mess created by the 65 companies it had acquired, WorldCom's then highly respected chief financial officer, Scott Sullivan, moved $400 million from a reserve account and recorded it as "income ~ in the company's public financial reports. Alerted to this, Cynthia Cooper, the perfectionist head of WorldCom's internal audit department, began to secretly examine the company's books at night. She soon discovered that Scott Sullivan (named a "best CFO" by CFO Magazine in 1998) and David Myers, WorldCom's controller, for years had publicly reported billions of dollars as "capital expenditures~ when they were really operating costs, ignored uncollectible receivables, and reported as "income" what were really reserve funds, and did all this with the help of Arthur Andersen, the company's auditor and accounting firm. Though angrily threatened by Sullivan, and risking her job and career, on June 20, 2002, an apprehensive Cooper courageously met with the audit committee of WorldCom's board of directors and told them what had been going on. On June 25, WorldCom's directors announced the company had inflated its profits by over $3.8 billion- an amount later raised to $9 billion- in the 9reatest accounting fraud in history. Sullivan and Myers were arrested; WorldCom shareholders lost $3 billion; 17,000 WorldCom workers lost their jobs; Arthur Andersen was shutdown for shredding evidence of other accounting frauds at other firms. Today, many WorldCom managers and employees do not speak to her and she sometimes cries. Says Cooper: "There Is a price to be paid. [But] it comes back to the values and ethics that you learn .... The fear of losing my job was secondary to the obligation I felt.

1. What does WorldCom's experience teach us about corporate wrongdoing?