This is the story of a telephone company (variously called Long Distance Discount Services, LDDS WorldCom, and just WorldCom), and its head of internal audit, Cynthia Cooper. In 1999, as the telecom boom began to fizzle, the management of Worldcom began to fiddle the books. This is the story of a crime, and the person who uncovered it. It's a great story, and one that has something to teach us about corporations and corporate crime today, almost ten years later, and will have something to teach us in another ten years. We're lucky to have Cooper, who was there to see it, there to do the right thing, and there to write about it afterwards.
Cooper does a good job in telling the story. She makes the accounting issues clear to people like me with no background in accounting, and the importance of internal audit obvious to people like me who have never had one and are not likely to. The book has a very thorough bibliography and index, although no chronology or time line. The book would have been clearer if Cooper had started at the beginning and told the story until she got to the end. The beginning of the book seems particularly clumsy: the narrative bounces backwards and forwards several times as Cooper foreshadows what's going to happen later in the story.
As Cooper describes how the fraud at WorldCom was committed and then discovered, she discusses the accounting issues clearly and in what I read as a matter of fact tone. I'm grateful that people like Cooper are focused on accounting and enforcing its rules, and I don't mean to belittle the profession, but I would have taken a different moral tone in telling the story. When you read the book, you have to remember that many of the people described are simply crooks. If there's a line to be drawn between accounting fraud and car-jacking, or robbing people at knife-point, it can only be that fraud is more efficient than robbing people one at a time.
I'm not sure whether Cooper is being ironic or not when she describes the good works that Bernie Ebbers and other WorldCom executives did in supporting the local community. It may not have been her intention, but it feels like an attempt to balance something positive against his crimes. If that starts to make sense to you, just think of all the good drug dealers do in bringing money into the local community, too. For me, Cooper betrays her bias in a single paragraph, when she recounts the way Ebbers treats two different employees: he continues to pay the salary of a Worldcom employee who has gone to jail for eighteen months for a white collar crime (otherwise unspecified), but he fires employees who aren't working hard enough. I'd make just the opposite choice.
The final part of the book is a very useful summary of a few different things: what happens to whistle blowers (usually not good), what happened during the trial of Bernie Ebbers, and how the Federal sentencing guidelines worked to commit him to prison for a long, long time.
The conclusion of the story has to be that, despite the title, there's nothing extraordinary about the crimes at Worldcom. They are a consequence of the way companies are structured, and the way executives are selected and compensated. As long as we have companies, we're going to need auditors as clear and courageous as Cooper. I highly recommend the book, not because Cooper is the next Hemingway, or even because her moral compass is infallible, but because the story and the issues behind it are important ones.
