Cynthia Cooper’s Discovery of WorldCom’s Fraud After earning her Master of Science in Accountancy at the University of Alabama, Cynthia Cooper started her career as a Certified Public Accountant. Later on in her career, she was named “People of the Year” by Time magazine for helping discover one of the largest accounting scandals in corporate history. Cynthia Cooper and her team of internal auditors detected the fraudulent activity that was conducted by the top managers of WorldCom and helped save investors millions of dollars, inspire new legislation, and made those responsible pay the consequences. As the Vice President of Internal Audit at WorldCom, Cynthia Cooper blew the whistle on a multibillion dollar fraud. In 1983, a telecommunication corporation was founded known as Long…show more content… Two years after its establishment, Bernard Ebbers became the CEO of the company. Ebbers strongly believed in a business strategy known as growth through acquisition. Growth through acquisition was when WorldCom constantly merged with other telecommunication companies in order to challenge financial analysts with comparison of different operating results throughout the company’s history (Katz). WorldCom made acquisitions with many major companies such as Williams Technology, IDB, and MFS but the largest one was made in 1998 when WorldCom merged with MCI Communications. This merger was over $37 billion dollars and was the largest merger in United States History. In 1999, WorldCom once again tried to make a large acquisition with Sprint Co. but was the Department of Justice denied the merger fearing it would create a monopoly. Bernard Ebbers and the CFO, Scott Sullivan, had no other