How Following Orders Can Harm Your Career

Betty Vinson has always kept her life well ordered. She posts one list on the refrigerator of what she needs to buy at Wal-Mart and another for the grocery store. She keeps a list of the clothes she wears to work so she doesn't repeat outfits too often. The daughter of the former owner of a small typewriter shop, she is known among her friends for her spicy Texas chili.

In 1996, she took a job as a midlevel accountant at a small long-distance company. Five years later, her solid career took a sudden turn in a very sorry direction. Today Ms. Vinson, 47 years old, is awaiting sentencing on conspiracy and securities-fraud charges. She has begun to prepare her 12-year-old daughter for the possibility that she will go to jail.

The long-distance company grew up to be telecom giant WorldCom Inc., which melted down last year in an $11 billion fraud, the biggest in corporate history. Asked by her bosses there to make false accounting entries, Ms. Vinson balked -- and then caved. Over the course of six quarters she continued to make the illegal entries to bolster WorldCom's profits at the request of her superiors. Each time she worried. Each time she hoped it was the last time. At the end of 18 months she had helped falsify at least $3.7 billion in profits. Ms. Vinson refused to talk about her work for WorldCom or the case against her.

Ms. Vinson and two colleagues ended up confessing their accounting sins to federal officials in a Courtyard Marriott hotel room. As the investigation got rolling, she hoped to be considered a witness. When the Justice Department shifted the case midstream from Mississippi to more-aggressive prosecutors in New York, she became a target.

Ms. Vinson's story is a cautionary tale for good corporate soldiers everywhere who find themselves ordered to do something wrong. In a recent speech to Wall Street executives, James Comey, the U.S. attorney prosecuting Ms. Vinson's case, said that "just following orders" is not an excuse for breaking the law. As Ms. Vinson's experience at WorldCom shows, sometimes it's hard to tell right from wrong in the heat of a workplace battle. And when an employee's livelihood is on the line, it's tough to say no to a powerful boss. Ms. Vinson wasn't alone in these predicaments. In a report issued this month, investigators hired by the company's new board found that dozens of employees knew about the fraud at WorldCom but were afraid to speak out.

Love of Math
Ms. Vinson played on the high-school tennis team here in her hometown and translated her love of math into an accounting major at Mississippi College. She lived at home and spent the summers working in her father's typewriter shop, which eventually closed after computers came into vogue.

Shortly after she graduated in 1978, she married Tom Vinson, her college sweetheart. Ms. Vinson took a series of positions at a small savings bank in Louisiana and then the Resolution Trust Corporation, there and in Kansas City. The couple moved home to Jackson in 1996, when Ms. Vinson got a job in the international accounting division at WorldCom making $50,000 a year.

The Vinsons moved to a quiet, manicured neighborhood on the outskirts of Jackson. They attended their daughter's soccer games, took on home-improvement projects and played with Cupcake, their curly-haired mutt. In her spare time, Ms. Vinson taught Sunday school and devoured John Grisham novels.

When she joined WorldCom, it was a small long-distance company on the verge of becoming a star of the Wall Street telecom boom. Ms. Vinson developed a reputation for being hardworking and diligent. She was known as a loyal employee who would "do anything you told her," says a former colleague. Many nights after dinner, she would retreat to her den to work on WorldCom's books until nearly midnight. On vacations, she squeezed in some work on her laptop.

Within two years, Ms. Vinson was promoted to be a senior manager in WorldCom's corporate accounting division, reporting to Buford Yates. In her new job, she helped compile quarterly results, along with 10 employees who reported to her. She analyzed the company's operating expenses and loss reserves, amounts put aside to cover certain kinds of expenses.

Mr. Yates, known as Buddy, had been recruited to join WorldCom in 1997 by David Myers, the company's controller. They had worked together at Lamar Life Insurance in Jackson. Also working for Mr. Yates was Troy Normand, a Baton Rouge, La., native, who oversaw accounting for the company's fixed expenses, such as property, plants and equipment.

Ms. Vinson's work world began to change in mid-2000. With the telecommunications industry in a severe slump, Chief Executive Bernard Ebbers and Chief Financial Officer Scott Sullivan informed Wall Street in July that the company's results for the second half of the year would fall below expectations. That warning turned out to be far too mild.

The company had a looming problem: Its huge line costs -- fees paid to lease portions of other companies' telephone networks -- were rising as a percentage of the company's revenue. Those numbers were carefully monitored by Wall Street. Then in the third quarter of 2000, the company was hit with $685 million in unpaid bills, after some of its small customers went belly-up.

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