Word: blowers
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...French politicians and business figures purportedly held accounts containing illegal kickback money from arms contracts. Those claims turned out to be false - as was the forged list of names of 89 Clearstream account holders that was sent to a French investigating judge in 2004 by an anonymous whistle-blower. Among those cited were then Finance Minister Sarkozy, who at the time was locked in a fierce battle with his boss, Prime Minister de Villepin, over who would run as the right's standard-bearer in the 2007 elections to succeed conservative President Jacques Chirac. The court will examine whether...
Wendell Potter may be the ideal whistle-blower. The former head of corporate communications for health-insurance giant Cigna, Potter turned against his old colleagues in June to testify before a congressional committee about what he viewed as the health-insurance industry's "duplicitous" behavior in the current health-reform debate. In his testimony, Potter outlined specific techniques insurers employ to "dump the sick" and protect stock price at all costs. His testimony was logical, specific and convincing, but that's only part of what makes Wendell Potter a perfect turncoat in the eyes of the pro-reform movement. (Watch...
...soft-spoken dad, calmly laying out his indictment of the for-profit insurance industry with a slight Tennessee twang, his gray hair buzzed and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. He isn't prone to hyperbole and, despite his having become a whistle-blower to "make amends" for the wrong he feels he did as a health-insurance executive, Potter is eerily calm, an island of serenity in the midst of the reform debate currently playing out at raucous town-hall meetings and amid charges of Nazism and racism. His effective communication technique is not accidental...
Unlike Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco-industry whistle-blower made famous in the movie The Insider, Potter doesn't have a smoking gun or secret documents to unveil. He signed a confidentiality agreement before leaving Cigna and intends to honor it. "I have no intention of disclosing any proprietary information," he says. For-profit health-insurance-industry practices Potter talks about, like rescission - dropping expensive-to-cover policyholders on grounds that they failed to disclose pre-existing health conditions - are not secrets. This is, in fact, how private health insurers make profits. In Potter's view, these practices just need more...
Mournfully, Kirtzman tells the story of Harry Markopolos, a flawed whistle-blower who tracked Madoff's misdeeds for almost a decade. An eccentric math genius, Markopolos waved his findings in the face of the SEC--he gave them a pointed memo in 2005 that was titled "The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud," but also made it clear that he wanted a reward for his efforts. Maybe the SEC should have paid him--it could have saved billions...