In 2002, Cynthia Cooper, Sherron Watkins, and Coleen Rowley were named Time magazine’s Persons of the Year 2002. Each of these women faced personal risks to reveal the wrongdoings at WorldCom, Enron, and the FBI, respectively. Cynthia Cooper was the head of the internal audit department at WorldCom. She discovered the accounting irregularities at WorldCom that ultimately resulted in the largest bankruptcy in American history. According to the article written about Cynthia Cooper, “Shareholders have lost some $3 billion since the news broke, and soon at least 17,000 WorldCom employees will have lost their jobs.” But Cynthia saw some good come from the downfall of WorldCom. She stated, “Internal audit departments are going to be taken more seriously.” (Note that Sarbanes-Oxley now requires public companies to maintain internal audit departments.) Also according to the article, “She has received [as of 2002] more than 100 letters and e-mails from strangers who want to thank and encourage her. But she has not been personally thanked by a single senior executive at WorldCom . . . and there is grumbling that some employees think that WorldCom could have borrowed its way out of its problems and avoided bankruptcy if she had stayed quiet.”

Required: 

Discuss the ethical situation faced by whistleblowers.