This story was included in yesterday’s news brief however comments are closed on those by default and we felt readers may have something to say about this topic.
New York Times has published a guest essay penned by Sherron Watkins and Cynthia Cooper, TIME’s 2002 Persons of the Year and, most notably, the people who have given audit professors teaching material for the next several decades. Sherron was Vice President of Corporate Development at Enron while Cynthia was Vice President of Internal Audit at WorldCom. Both saw something and said something, kicking off a chain of events that led to the biggest corporate accounting scandal of the 21st century so far, bringing the Big 5 audit firms down to just four, and creating exceedingly large piles of SOX compliance work in need of doing ever since. You all know the story.
In “We Exposed Fraud at Enron and WorldCom. Don’t Let History Repeat Itself.” they write [any bold emphasis ours]:
More than two decades ago we blew the whistle at Enron and WorldCom, industry giants whose spectacular falls revealed two of the largest accounting fraud scandals in American history. We know the destruction that fraud causes. We lived through it. We witnessed how unchecked power, collusion at the highest levels and manipulated financial statements can bring down iconic companies, destabilize markets and vaporize billions of dollars and thousands of jobs overnight.
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