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Gold, Dana L. --- "Whistleblowers: The Critical Link in Corporate Accountability" [2005] ELECD 208; in Tully, Stephen (ed), "Research Handbook on Corporate Legal Responsibility" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005)

Book Title: Research Handbook on Corporate Legal Responsibility

Editor(s): Tully, Stephen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843768203

Section: Chapter 14

Section Title: Whistleblowers: The Critical Link in Corporate Accountability

Author(s): Gold, Dana L.

Number of pages: 17

Extract:

14 Whistleblowers: the critical link in
corporate accountability
Dana L. Gold



Introduction
Focus on corporate wrongdoing has been unyielding since the now-infamous
accounting fraud scandals of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, Global
Crossing and others eclipsed the news at the end of 2001. Despite the height-
ened attention on corporate accountability, scandals continue to emerge, rang-
ing from fraud in the mutual fund industry to the international scandal of
Parmalat in Italy to improprieties in the US government's distribution of
federal contracts to Boeing and Halliburton. Dramatic responses to corporate
fraud in the form of sweeping US legislative reforms (specifically the
Sarbanes­Oxley Act of 2002, passed to restore investor and consumer confi-
dence in the corporate sector), aggressive prosecutions of top corporate exec-
utives, revisions to stock exchange listing requirements that mandate specific
corporate governance reforms by publicly traded companies, and increased
activism on the part of shareholders, board directors and stakeholder groups,
have all thrown into question deeply held presumptions about market econom-
ics, ideal corporate governance structures and the role of corporations in soci-
ety generally.
Corporate wrongdoing, despite the recent attention, is not new. Egregious
examples include the excessive overcharging of materials by defence contrac-
tors in the 1980s; the environmental and health disaster in Bhopal, India
caused by Union Carbide (now part of Dow Chemical) when its pesticide
plant's cooling system failed, causing a gas leak that killed 8000 people in
three days and poisoned more than 500,000; the deliberate misrepresentation
by ...