The Myth of the Enron Whistleblower

Sherron-WatkinsJust about the time that you think that Sherron Watkins has faded back into obscurity, she finds yet another way to promote herself:

Sherron Watkins, the former vice president at Enron who tried to blow the whistle on the accounting violations at the scandal-plagued Houston energy-trading giant, told an audience at a seminar Friday on the new whistleblower provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act that she and other whistleblower employees would probably take their concerns to WikiLeaks rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission now.

“People now will go to WikiLeaks to protect themselves,” she said during a briefing at the New York State Society of CPAs’ Foundation for Accounting Education offices in Manhattan. “WikiLeaks is a huge, huge sledgehammer that many employees will go to. People like myself will just go to WikiLeaks.”

Watkins, a CPA, said that since she came forward, she has been unable to get a job in corporate America despite her years of experience as an accountant and portfolio manager.

“The label whistleblower is stuck on my head,” she said. She now makes her living by giving speeches, and said she has heard from other whistleblowers about their inability to get jobs in their old occupations.

Well, isn’t that interesting? Courageous whistleblowers such as Watkins now have in WikiLeaks another valuable conduit for publicizing alleged corporate wrongdoing.
There is only one problem with that narrative, at least as it applies to Watkins.

She was never a whistleblower.

I wonder whether Watkins’ difficulty in finding a job “in corporate America” is at least partly attributable to the fact that most prospective employers are not inclined to hire someone for a management position who disingenuously presented herself to Congress, the mainstream media and the public as a whistleblower when she really wasn’t?

5 thoughts on “The Myth of the Enron Whistleblower

  1. Agreed, I think.
    What they actually want is team players of the “go along to get along” variety.
    Cowboys/girls/Mavericks and boat-rockers should not
    apply.

  2. You see, Tom, we are supposed to believe that the Enron Task Force was composed of pure-hearted investigators who simply wanted to know the truth and to pursue justice. Anything else is not acceptable.
    For example, just because prosecutors told Andrew Fastow to lie and that they hid things from the defense does not matter. Federal prosecutors NEVER lie, and they are the world’s most brilliant attorneys. If you doubt what I am saying, just ask one of them, and he or she will explain that the pursuit of justice is so important that money cannot figure into that person’s equation.
    (Now, the fact that more and more convictions permit these people to advance their careers in the federal system, and that they are permitted to engage in the worst kind of power plays has nothing to do with motivation. Oh, no. These are pure and sinless beings. The fact that none of them ever are held accountable for lawbreaking is irrelevant, since everyone knows that federal prosecutors never break the law, they never withhold evidence, they never lie to judges and the public, they never illegally leak grand jury information in order to taint their cases, and they never pile on charges to force even innocent people to plead guilty because they cannot afford the legal fees.)
    As for Watkins, I’m sure that she never was on an ego trip at all. No, this is someone who probably is the Greatest Accountant Who Ever Has Lived and is being deprived of using her Great Skills because she might have to make public accusations against her future employer, and who wants the truth to be exposed?
    By the way, for all of the accusations against Enron, does anyone doubt that Congress and the administration engage in accounting tricks that would make Bernie Madoff an honest man? What about the Federal Reserve System? Oh, we are told that the Fed is so important that it cannot be audited.
    Why? I guess is that if people found out that the Fed was an empty shell instead of the Great Bastion of Financial Integrity and Wonder and Power that the NY Times insists that it is, they might lose confidence in the way the Fed does business.
    By the way, I won’t even go into some of the tricks used by the Enron Task Force, nor will I detail the curious relationship between Bethany McLean (then of Forbes and CNBC) and Sean Berkowitz, the leader of the ETF. Oh, I forgot. She now is Mrs. Sean Berkowitz and she is the Great Defender of Fannie and Freddie, which had a combined leverage of more than 70 to 1 during the housing bubble.
    So, Tom, I guess that integrity is where we see it, and there are some people posting who have chosen to strain at gnats and swallow camels.

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