Sherron Watkins Is No Whistleblower

Sharron Watkins is ready to take the stand at today’s Enron trial. She’s become a mini-celebrity due to her role as the brave whistleblower inside Enron. Watkins was even named one of Time’s “Persons of the Year,” along with two other female whistleblowers. We even had to endure articles asking us if women are really more honest than men.
Unlike the other two women (Cynthia Cooper and Coleen Rowley), Sherron Watkins is no whistleblower. All she did was write an anonymous letter to Ken Lay. She didn’t go to the media or regulators, and she never followed up.
You can read the memo here. In it, you can see that she’s not only not a whistleblower, she was actually concerned that others might blow the whistle. I’ll politely skip over the issue of Time, owned by what was once known as AOL Time Warner, pointing out the problems of creative accounting.
Dan Ackman sums up what Watkins really did:

A whistle-blower, literally speaking, is someone who spots a criminal robbing a bank and blows a whistle, alerting the police. That’s not Sherron Watkins.
What the Enron vice president did was write a memo to the bank robber, suggesting he stop robbing the bank and offering ways to avoid getting caught. Then she met with the robber, who said he didn’t believe he was robbing the bank, but said he’d investigate to find out for sure. Then, for all we know, Watkins did nothing, and her memo was not made public until congressional investigators released it six weeks after Enron filed for bankruptcy.

Don’t feel too bad for her. She already had her $500,000 book deal.

Posted by on March 15th, 2006 at 2:24 pm


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