First, it was Sherron Watkins portraying herself for profit on the rubber-chicken circuit as a whistleblower of wrongdoing at Enron when, in fact, she was no such thing.

Now, this USA Today article raises substantial questions regarding the credibility and veracity of self-proclaimed Enron whistleblower and “corporate integrity” author Lynn Brewer:

Within the world of business ethics, Brewer is considered a star. She is a founding member of the Open Compliance and Ethics Group. She delivered the keynote address at a Sarbanes-Oxley conference hosted by the New York Stock Exchange in 2003 (there are video clips of it on her website, www.lynnbrewer.info).

She has spoken in Great Britain, India, Venezuela, Italy, Canada, Malaysia and New Zealand, and given keynote addresses at dozens of other gatherings in the USA. She’s also a regular speaker at universities, where she lectures students on the importance of ethics in business.

Brewer has even co-authored an article in Business Strategy Review with noted management guru Oren Harari showing how the leadership skills of Colin Powell could have been applied at Enron.

But to those who worked with her at Enron, when she was known as EddieLynn Morgan (she changed her name after getting married in 2000), her transformation from back-office researcher to international corporate governance heroine is astonishing.

“I don’t think people will even believe this,” says Ceci Twachtman, a former colleague, speaking of Brewer’s transformation. “It reminds me of that movie with Leo DiCaprio with Pan Am,” she adds, referring to Catch Me If You Can, a story about a high school dropout who passes himself off as an airline pilot.

“Eddie Lynn is a good nurse who is trying to claim she was a brain surgeon,” says Tony Mends, a former vice president at Enron who was her boss for much of her tenure at the company. [. . .]

When it comes to giving specifics about her whistle-blowing, Brewer contradicts herself.

In her book, subtitled A Whistleblower’s Story, she recounts her failed efforts to alert her immediate superiors to questionable actions. She also says that just before she left the company in November 2000, she called the employee-assistance help-line to complain about criminal activity at Enron.

She says she was rebuffed there, but instead of taking her complaints to the chief compliance officer at Enron, or regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Justice Department, she accepted a severance package and left.

In her speeches, Brewer dons a different mantle, presenting herself as one of the collaborators in fraudulent activity at Enron and asking her audience for forgiveness.

Read the entire article.

I swear, you can’t make this stuff up.