|
|
|||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
News Search
|
|
23-12-2002 Scotsman Women who cried foul join Time elite By Gethin Chamberlain PRESIDENTS have won it, prime ministers have won it, even Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin have won it, but this year, the influential US magazine Time has broken with convention to award the title of most influential person of the year to three relatively unknown women who blew the whistle on their bosses' failings. Coleen Rowley, Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins yesterday became the first women since Philippines president Corazon Aquino in 1986 to take the title of Time's Person(s) of the Year. Ms Watkins was the Enron vice-president who first warned the company's accounting methods were improper; Ms Rowley lifted the lid on FBI bungling over one of the men accused of organising the 11 September attacks; and Ms Cooper triggered the collapse of WorldCom when she exposed the way in which the company had hidden losses of 2.3 billion pounds. The list of previous winners has been notably short of female representation, with Aquino, the Queen, Wallis Simpson and Madame Chiang Kai-shek the only other named women to take the title since 1927, although in 1975, the magazine decided to honour US women in general for finally achieving a measure of equality with men. But the decision to honour this year's winners is being seen as reflecting a change in US values, away from the idolisation of corporate and political power. Ms Watkins, interviewed by the magazine, said she felt disheartened to discover that the FBI had as many problems as corporate America. "In this country, we have a vacuum in leadership. We value the wrong people," she said. In a year dominated by the twin themes of corporate shame and terrorist threats, Time appears to have decided to reward people who demonstrated the importance of individual responsibility. Jim Kelly, the managing editor, said the women embody a critical struggle facing the US - how to restore trust in disgraced institutions, from major corporations to the Catholic Church. "It's their modesty that's so becoming," said Mr Kelly. "All three are just resolute in standing up for what is right. All three of them are made of very strong character." The reason the women were chosen, he said, was "for believing - really believing - that the truth is one thing that must not be moved off the books, and for stepping in to make sure that it wasn't". In its introduction to this year's award the magazine wrote: "They took huge professional and personal risks to blow the whistle on what went wrong at WorldCom, Enron and the FBI - and in so doing helped remind us what American courage and American values are all about." The list of previous winners reads like a who's who of the most significant figures of the last 75 years. Franklin Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Winston Churchill, Nikita Khrushchev, Martin Luther King, Charles de Gaulle, John F Kennedy and the Ayatollah Khomeini all feature, along with dozens of other household names. But the magazine argued that the US was at a critical juncture. Mss Watkins, Rowley and Cooper, it said, had "kick-started conversations essential to the clean operation of American life, conversations that will continue for years". As the US begins to recover from the 11 September attacks, attention has begun to focus on the failings in intelligence that made life easier for the hijackers. "If we can't trust the institutions charged with tracking terrorists to do the job," the magazine says, "homeland defence will be an empty phrase. The Coleen Rowleys of the federal workforce will be the ones who will let us know what's going on." And it says that the time has come to call corporate America to account for its excesses. "Accounting scams of the kind practised at Enron and WorldCom will continually need to be exposed and corrected before yet another phalanx of high-level operators gets the wrong idea and a thousand Enrons bloom," it writes. But the women themselves appear to be reluctant heroes, who have made no attempt to cash in on their whistle-blowing activity. As the magazine points out, their actions only came to light because their memos were leaked. Comparing them to the 11 September firefighters, the magazine describes them as heroes chosen by circumstance. "They were people who did right just by doing their jobs rightly - which means ferociously, with eyes open and with the bravery the rest of us always hope we have and may never know if we do," it writes. The bad news for bosses is that when questioned, six out of ten Americans thought whistle-blowers were heroes, while only two out of ten thought they were traitors, and nearly three out of four said they would blow the whistle if they observed serious criminal wrongdoing at work. Women of action COLEEN Rowley, 48, wrote a 13-page memo to the FBI's director, Robert Mueller, in May, criticising the agency for ignoring evidence before 11 September, 2001 that hinted of an attack. She later told the Senate that the FBI was mired in bureaucracy and "careerism". Cynthia Cooper, 38, a WorldCom internal auditor, alerted the company's board in June to £2.3 billion accounting irregularities. A month later, the telecommunications giant declared the largest bankruptcy in US history. She lost 30lb in weight through the stress of the experience but continues to work in the company's internal-auditing division. Sherron Watkins, 43, sent memos in August 2001 warning the Enron chairman, Kenneth Lay, that improper accounting might cause the company to collapse. The company later filed for bankruptcy and Watkins resigned as a vice-president last month. An accountant's story - when speaking out can be hazardous FIRMS seeking to discourage employees from blowing the whistle would no doubt want to highlight the unfortunate experience of Marta Andreasen. Ms Andreasen was suspended from her post as the European Union's chief accountant earlier this year when she claimed the EU's accounting systems were open to fraud. Spanish-born Ms Andreasen, who is still facing the prospect of disciplinary action, said she was threatened with the sack when she first warned of the "dangerous failings" in the way the EU managed its books. The "glaring shortcomings" in the management of the £63 billion annual budget were of Enron-style proportions, it was alleged. Ms Andreasen said she was shocked to find that basic accounting standards, such as double-entry book-keeping, were not applied and many members of staff in positions of financial responsibility were not trained accountants. She also wanted to replace the EU system of accounting, known as Sincom 2, with the more widely-used SAP system. Her reward for raising her concerns, first with Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, and then to MEPs, was a public naming and shaming by Neil Kinnock, the vice-president of the commission. After complaining to Mr Prodi, she was originally transferred to the commission's personnel and administration department and then, in August, suspended while an internal inquiry was carried out. "What she did was to make claims, so far unsubstantiated . . . claims that new financial laws increase fraud and risk," Mr Kinnock said at the time. "When a civil servant makes public claims of that kind, can the employing authority really be expected to ignore it? We acted in a way that any public service would act in any democracy."
|
|
||||
|
................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
|||||||
