Bernie Ebbers Gone To Jail Essay

Bernie Ebbers should have gone to jail. I disagree with the 25 year length of his sentence but he is at least partially to blame for the WorldCom fiasco. I think the government used the length of the sentence to prove a point and the only prior sentence comparable to this was John J. Rigas from Adelphia Communications earlier in the year . I think the CFO Scott Sullivan got a light sentence and consciously knew what he was doing and could have put a stop to it. He should have been the good advisor telling Ebbers not to proceed with this fraud. Ebbers probably could not have figured out how to produce this type of fraud without financial experts doing the dirty work. Even if Ebbers was the one telling his accountants to cook the books, his accountants and the auditors should have put a stop to it. There were too many people that knew what was going on. Somebody should have said this is not right and I could not live with myself if I did this. In my searches of information, I tried to find reasoning to why Ebbers should not have gone to jail. As much as I looked and thought I had an
It is by no means a new topic. At the library I found plenty of books that focused on Business Ethics published before well before 2000. Simple books like the Power of Ethical Management by Blanchard would have made the Ebbers and Sullivan's decisions much easier on what was the right thing to do. In the introduction to the Corporate Fraud Handbook by JT Wells, it mentions Cressey’s “Fraud Triangle” and Albrecht’s “Fraud Scale” analyzing why people commit fraud (both were models written well before the WorldCom fraud case). Albrecht listed nine motivators to commit fraud and it would be interesting to analyze this case more and see how many of these fit Ebbers. In a way, we should be glad this happened just so we can get corporate priorities