Cynthia Cooper was vice president for internal auditing at the WorldCom corporation in 2002, when she spilled the beans on the company's phony accounting practices, which made WorldCom appear to be making excellent profits, artificially inflating its stock price.
Cooper took her charges to the board's auditing committee. The firm's chief financial officer was soon fired, an unusual turn of events when higher-ups are shown to have done something wrong. (The usual chain of events includes denial, cover-up, fixing blame on underlings, and paying executives extra for having "managed" the crisis so well.)
Because of crooked leadership, the company very soon had to let go thousands of employees, and its stock dropped like a hot rock. CEO Bernie Ebbers was found guilty of fraud in 2005. The company passed into history, and Cooper started her own consulting firm in Mississippi.
This story is unusual in that the whistleblower came out of it well and the responsible executives above her did not. The WorldCom debacle proved to be the harbinger of many other sad episodes of gross dishonesty in U.S. business and finance and signaled a period in which the American economy was almost thrown into depression due to unchecked greed and gross dishonesty.
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