Word: cooperate
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...June 11, Sullivan called Cooper and gave her 10 minutes to come to his office and describe what her team was up to, says a source involved with the case. She did, and Sullivan, known for his poker face, remained calm. He then asked her to delay the audit, according to a WorldCom timeline of events filed with the SEC. She told him that would not happen. The meeting was a turning point for her because she, like her colleagues in the industry, considered Sullivan the gold standard. "It was terribly disappointing," says Cooper...
...next day, Cooper told the head of the audit committee about her findings, but she still held out hope that there was a reasonable explanation. She and her team began looking for ways to somehow justify what they had found in the books. Finally, they confronted WorldCom's controller, David Myers, who admitted he knew the accounting could not be justified, according to an internal-audit memo...
That's when Cooper's heart sank. Soon after, she called her mother in exhaustion. "'There are some things terribly, terribly wrong at WorldCom,'" Patsy remembers her daughter saying. "And I was just pained at the tone of her voice." Several times Cooper told her colleagues she was concerned about what this would mean for the families of implicated WorldCom executives. "One of the things about Cynthia," says an employee who has worked closely with her, "is that if she has to step on toes, she's not uncomfortable doing that. But at the same time, she has great empathy...
...showdown was scheduled for June 20. Cooper and a member of her team headed to Washington for an audit-committee meeting of WorldCom's board of directors. Sullivan would be there to present his side of the story. "We kept waiting up until the very end for Scott to pull a rabbit out of a hat," says a person close to the case. Relations had become so tense that at the last minute, when Cooper and her colleague learned that the management team was booked at the same hotel, they switched to another...
Sullivan refused to step down and was fired. Myers resigned. The next day, WorldCom came clean about its books. Cooper went directly to her parents' house and sat down at the table in stunned silence. It was an appropriate pausing place. Cooper attributes her endurance in the investigation to her mother. "She would say, 'Never allow yourself to be intimidated; always think about the consequences of your actions...