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Whistleblower

In: Business and Management

Submitted By Dauren
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A whistleblower is a person who tells the public or someone in authority about alleged dishonest or illegal activities (misconduct) occurring in a government department or private company or organization.
In 2002 Time named three where unique women as its person of year. All three had blown the whistle on what could be easily categorized as the largest scandals by government and corporate organizations.
Cynthia Cooper is a native of Clinton, Mississippi who formerly served as the Vice President of Internal Audit at WorldCom. In 2002, Cooper and her team of auditors worked together and often at night and in secret to investigate and unearth $3.8 billion in fraud at WorldCom. At the time, this was the largest incident of accounting fraud in U.S. history.
Since leaving MCI, Cooper has started her own consulting firm. In addition, Cooper speaks to professionals as well as high school and college students to share her experiences and lessons learned. Cooper's book about her life and the WorldCom fraud, Extraordinary Circumstances: “The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower”, was published in 2008. Profits from the book were given to universities for ethics education.
Coleen Rowley grew up in a small town in northeast Iowa. She obtained a B.A. degree in French from Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa and then attended the College of Law at the University of Iowa. She graduated with honors in 1980 and passed the Iowa Bar Exam that summer.
In January of 1981, Ms. Rowley was appointed as a Special Agent with the FBI and initially served in the Omaha, Nebraska and Jackson, Mississippi Divisions.
In 1990, Ms. Rowley was transferred to Minneapolis where she assumed the duties of Chief Division Counsel, which entailed oversight of the Freedom of Information, Forfeiture, Victim-Witness and Community Outreach Programs as well as providing regular legal and ethics training to FBI Agents of the Division and additional outside police training.
In May of 2002, Ms. Rowley brought several of the pre 9/11 lapses to light and testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on some of the endemic problems facing the FBI and the intelligence community. Ms. Rowley's memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller in connection with the Joint Intelligence Committee's Inquiry led to a two-year-long Department of Justice Inspector General investigation. She was one of three whistleblowers chosen as Person of the Year by TIME magazine.

In April 2003, following an unsuccessful and highly criticized attempt to warn the Director and other administration officials about the dangers of launching the invasion of Iraq, Ms. Rowley stepped down from her (GS-14) legal position to resume her position as a (GS-13) FBI Special Agent. She retired from the FBI at the end of 2004 and now speaks publicly to various groups, ranging from school children to business/professional/civic groups, on two different topics: ethical decision-making and "balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation."
Sherron Watkins (born August 28, 1959) was Vice President of Corporate Development at the Enron Corporation. She is considered by many to be the whistleblower who helped to uncover the Enron scandal in 2001.
In August 2001, Watkins blew the whistle internally by alerting then-Enron CEO Kenneth Lay of accounting irregularities in financial reports. However, Watkins has been criticized for not speaking up publicly sooner about her concerns, as her memo did not reach the public until five months after it was written.
Watkins testified before committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate at the beginning of 2002 and was selected as one of three "People of the Year 2002" by Time. (The two other whistleblowers who joined her as "People of the Year" were Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom and Coleen Rowley of the FBI.)
Watkins was born in Tomball, Texas. She had joined Enron in 1993, having worked for Arthur Andersen the previous eight years. She departed from Enron in November 2002. Since then she has been giving speeches at colleges and management congresses. She has also co-written a book about her experiences at Enron and the problems of the US corporate culture.

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