Just Following Orders
Posted by taxguru on June 23, 2003
The WSJ has a very interesting story of a corporate accountant with WorldCom who made the entries, under orders of her bosses, to artificially inflate the book income. Even though the idea to do this wasn’t hers, she will be doing some prison time for just following orders.
It is definitely a tough spot for middle and low level employees to resist pressures to do illegal things. I saw a lot of this during my time as a internal auditor, investigating various fraudulent activities. If reporting these illegal things to the corporate audit committee or Internal Audit department doesn’t do any good, the only smart move is to quit. When the house of cards collapses, you can be fairly certain that the top dogs will have stashed enough away to take care of themselves and will leave their underlings hung out to dry.
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