Ethics paramount, whistleblower says
By Ryan Groshong
Despite being "scared to death," Time Magazine's 2002 person of the year and a "genuine hero," Cynthia Cooper relied on her values, ethical boundaries and courage to expose an $11 billion fraud operation at WorldCom.
In 2002, Cooper, then the vice president of the internal audit department at the telecommunications company exposed fraud that included misrepresenting funds in a way that allowed them to turn a $662 million loss into a $2.4 billion profit.
Cooper spoke about her journey in a presentation titled, "WorldCom: What Went Wrong and Corporate Governance Lessons Learned," Wednesday afternoon in Mayer Theatre.
She stressed the importance of having personal ethics.
"Going through an event like the one I went through at WorldCom has made me even more aware of teaching my own two daughters the importance of ethical decision making," she said.
Since coming forward with the WorldCom information, Cooper has traveled across the country speaking about the importance of ethics in education.
"Some people say that you can't teach people to be ethical at the college level, but what you can do is you can provide students with the tools so that No. 1, they'll be more likely to recognize an ethical dilemma when they're in the work force and secondly that they'll be more likely to make the right decision," she said.
Cooper also spoke about the value of faith-based ethics and morals, and the golden rule of "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" that transcends all major religions.
"In the rush of the business world it is sometimes easy to look over the humanity of our daily encounters but the golden rule endures because it is such a central tenet of our existence."
Cooper did not second-guess her decision to come forward with the information; however, it was a difficult process for her. After the scandal broke, Cooper, her family and her neighbors were under intense media scrutiny for months.
WorldCom was also a big employer in her Mississippi home, the only Fortune 500 company in the poorest state in the country.
Although she never received threats on her life like some "whistleblowers," she was blamed by some former employees for the loss of their jobs.
After reading in the book "Whistle Blowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Powers" that "most whistle blowers lost their houses, many lost their families ... most will suffer from depression and alcoholism, around half went bankrupt" and that "a typical fate is for a nuclear engineer to end up selling computers at RadioShack," Cooper relied on the strength of her family and her personal convictions to make sure that fate would not happen to her.
"I'm still a mother, I'm still a wife, and if I ended up working at Wal-Mart, I've always wanted to be the Wal-Mart greeter anyway," she said. "It seems like the best job in the country, so be it."
* Contact Ryan Groshong at (408) 554-4546 or rgroshong@scu.edu.