In 2002, Cynthia Cooper, then WorldCom’s vice president of internal audit, led a small team that investigated the company’s accounts in secret and often worked at night. Their work uncovered $3.8 billion in fraud, described at the time as the largest corporate fraud in U.S. history. The discovery showed that WorldCom’s internal controls had failed to prevent or surface massive financial misconduct before Cooper’s team intervened.
The supplied source does not identify the executives or accounting entries responsible for the fraud, nor does it detail the subsequent criminal prosecutions or regulatory proceedings. It does establish that WorldCom entered bankruptcy, later operated as MCI, and that Cooper remained for two years to help the company emerge. Cooper was named one of Time’s three 2002 “People of the Year,” and her whistleblower account later became the basis of a 2008 book and ongoing ethics education work.
