When ExxonMobil announced unexpectedly bullish targets for pumping oil out of Texas and New Mexico in the spring of 2019, the news sparked confusion for two scientists at the company.
That confusion grew into alarm as the scientists began to suspect management planned to pin what they saw as a potentially fraudulent forecast on them.
Damian Burch and Lindsey Gulden would soon complain to ExxonMobil’s human resources investigators that Burch’s team was pressured to doctor data to make it look like the company was poised to generate billions of dollars more in oil than it was, according to interviews and the findings of a Labor Department investigation.
Burch said he was so unnerved at being directed to gin up a scientific outlook bolstering the company CEO’s misleading public statements that he named the file: “Please_do_not_turn_this_into_a_lie.xlsx.”
Eventually, the company acted on the concerns raised by the scientists, according to the federal investigation: It fired them.
“I had never seen anything like this before,” said Burch, who worked at the company for more than a decade and holds a doctorate in applied mathematics. “Management said to just override the experts so we can get to the number the CEO has already blasted to the public. We could not find any evidence to support it. The science did not support it. The data did not support it. Nothing supported it.”
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