FCPAméricas Blog
FCPA Compliance Lessons from “The Informant” (Part 2: Insights from a whistleblower)
8.23.2013
This is Part 2 of an interview with Mark Whitacre, the whistleblower who exposed ADM’s multi-billion dollar price fixing scheme and went to prison himself for defrauding the company too. You can read Part 1 here. For three years Mr. Whitacre wore a wire for the FBI. The movie “The Informant” was based on his personal story. In this post, Mr. Whitacre provides insights from the perspective of a whistleblower.
While you were wearing a wire for the FBI, you started stealing money from the company yourself. Describe the scheme.
The pressures of wearing a wire were so great. I started having a nervous breakdown. I even attempted suicide. I started to think that I would get fired and lose the salary and stock options, so I decided to write my own severance. I set up a dummy company and wrote checks to it. When everything became public and the executives learned that I was an informant, they called the media and FBI and told them that I was engaging in fraud too. They went to prison for price fixing, and I went to prison for fraud. It was poor judgment and poor thinking on my part, and I made those decisions under the pressure of wearing a wire, but it was my own thinking at the time.
Do you feel that attitudes towards whistleblowers have changed since you were one?
Views of whistleblowers have changed dramatically. In the 1990s, corporate America hated whistleblowers. They were pariahs. I think that WorldCom and Enron changed their reputation. The fact that these companies collapsed and investors lost so much money and so many people suffered, perhaps people realized that a whistleblower might have stopped these problems before they became a lot worse. For example, had I not stepped up, ADM could have very well collapsed. Who knows what would have happened if they had not had new management. As bad as the price fixing was, the company was starting to get into other things, like stealing technology. But now the company is much stronger and stockholders are doing well. Even though there is an FCPA investigation under way, I would be very surprised if those allegations involved the higher ups, as they did before.
The fact that Time magazine put three female whistleblowers on the cover of the magazine as person of the year is a sign of significant change. That would have never happened in the mid-1990s. Today whistleblowers are thought of as model citizens. They have become a respected entity.
Given everything you have learned, what messages do you have for FCPA compliance officers?
I always emphasize in my talks that ADM had a compliance program. And it was probably a good one. But it was all in a file cabinet. Keep in mind that this case was in the early 1990s. I was there for seven years, and no one ever told me about the program. This meant that I wasn’t telling the thousands of employees who worked for me about it either. I guess we just had a policy so we could tell the shareholders we had one.
If your program is only on paper and not being used, if it is dormant and inactive, then it is just like not having one. If you have a program, it needs to be living. Employees need to know about it. You need to train, and retrain on how important it is.
And if the people who are being trained see that management really supports it, they will be passionate too. I recently spoke at a day-long company ethics program for a major multinational where the president introduced the conference with a 30 minute speech to more than 400 people. Then he proceeded to stay for the whole day. He was engaged too. The people leaving that conference knew that compliance was one of the most important things in the company. They knew that they were expected to do the right thing. I really believe that, if it is important to the company and management, it will be important to the employees too.
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Post authored by Matteson Ellis, FCPAméricas Founder & Editor
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