whistleblower

Whistleblower website forced off the internet

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Wikileaks.org, a site that allowed people to anonymously leak incriminating documents, has been shut down by its web host, Dynadot. Dynadot, shut it down and locked the domain name so it can’t be transferred to another host, pursuant to an agreement settling a lawsuit against it.

Someone posted documents on the site claimed to show that a bank in the Cayman Islands was engaged in money laundering and tax evasion. Julius Baer, the parent company of the accused bank brought a lawsuit against Dynadot after unsuccessfully trying to get the site to remove the documents.

Instead of defending itself in the lawsuit, Dynadot decided it was easier to shut down the site. But this I think is even more interesting: Dynadot is turning over information about Wikileaks, including IP addresses and information associated with the site. Continue reading

Cynthia Cooper’s book – Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower

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cooper.jpgCynthia Cooper, WorldCom whistleblower, is releasing her book in just few days. Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower is her story. If it is anything like the speech I heard her give a few years ago at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners Fraud Conference, it will be fantastic.

Unlike other so-called whistleblowers of the Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco era… Cynthia is the true hero. She stood up for what she knew was right and she suffered for it. Make no mistake that she was in danger as she and her team attempted to get to the bottom of accounting shenanigans at WorldCom.

Publishers Weekly writes:

In Cooper’s thorough and efficient narrative about the fantastic collapse of telecommunications giant WorldCom there are two distinct themes: her insider’s view of the corporation’s widespread wrongdoing and the life experiences that led Cooper to becoming a courageous whistleblower. Cooper, former vice president of WorldCom’s internal audit department, is most successful with the former. She brings us into the boardrooms, the backrooms and, somehow, into the heads of key players as some struggled with and others embraced the deceptions that would bring WorldCom down.

I’ll be reviewing the book in the next couple of weeks and can’t wait to share my thoughts.

Whistleblower Cases in 2006

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A recent article on Forbes.com put the whistleblower issue in perspective financially. In the last year, the Justice Department says that whistleblowers revealed $1.3 billion of fraud, mostly in the health care arena. This was apparently one of the bigger years for the Justice department. The whistleblowers were paid $190 million for their assistance.

This fiscal year, the Federal government recovered $3.1 billion in settlements from people and companies in whistleblower cases. The largest settlement was $920 million from Tenet Healthcare, the second largest hospital group in the country. Tenet was accused of overbilling the government for $806 million in Medicare and paying $49 million in kickbacks to doctors.