Bernard Ebbers and WorldCom: The $11 Billion Accounting Fraud

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In 1983 Bernard Ebbers and three partners sketched a company in a motel coffee shop in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Fifteen years later it completed what was then the largest corporate merger in United States history. This episode traces how Long Distance Discount Services became WorldCom by buying more than 60 telecommunications firms, outbidding AT&T and Sprint for Advanced Telecommunications in 1992 and taking MCI for 37 billion dollars in 1998. Growth by acquisition made Ebbers a titan and left a tangle of billing systems and debt underneath.

The machine stopped when regulators blocked a 129 billion dollar merger with Sprint, just as the dot-com bubble burst. Ebbers had borrowed heavily against his own shares to buy ranches, timberland, and a yacht builder, and the board lent him 408.2 million dollars so he would not have to sell. Then the books were changed. Line costs became capital assets, revenue was invented, and the lie grew to 11 billion dollars until an internal audit team working nights pulled it apart.

• WorldCom booked everyday interconnection fees as capital expenditures, the equivalent of recording an electric bill as a home renovation.
• Internal auditor Cynthia Cooper and her associate Gene Morse found an initial 3.8 billion dollars in fraudulent entries in June 2002 despite pushback from CFO Scott Sullivan, and took it to the audit committee.
• The outside auditor was Arthur Andersen, convicted over Enron just days before the WorldCom fraud surfaced.
• WorldCom filed for Chapter 11 on July 21, 2002, then the largest bankruptcy in US history. It paid a 2.25 billion dollar SEC penalty, became MCI again, and was bought by Verizon in 2006.
• Ebbers was convicted on March 15, 2005 and sentenced to 25 years. He served 13, was released in late 2019, and died in February 2020.