William D Cohan on Wall Street whistleblowers
On Wall Street, as everyone now knows, wrongdoing by bankers, traders and executives led to disaster in 2008 after they were rewarded for taking risks with other peoples money. Leading bankers and traders were motivated by the hope of getting large bonuses to package up mortgages into securities and then sell them off as AAA-rated investments all over the world. This happened even though one damning email after another makes clear they knew some of the mortgages would probably default and that the securities should never have been sold in the first place. But some people did try to blow the whistle the problem is they were not listened to. Worse than that, they were treated in a way that would discourage anyone from following in their footsteps.
I interviewed three whistleblowers from different periods of the recent crises that have befallen Wall Street. All three of them made allegations of wrongdoing at their banks, made strenuous efforts to report what they had discovered through internal and external channels and all three were either fired from their jobs after trying to share the information they had stumbled upon or quit in frustration.
Their testimonies and the details of what happened to them are important. Not only do they illustrate the existential risks that whistleblowers take when they attempt to point out wrongdoing that they uncover at powerful institutions. They also matter because their stories show just how uninterested these institutions genuinely remain despite the lip service of internal hotlines and support groups in actually ferreting out bad behaviour. The stories of these three whistleblowers reveal, too, how little the regulators charged with keeping watch over the Wall Street banks seem to care about holding them in any way accountable. Often the regulators seemed to be willing to ignore the allegations presented to them.
-- Wall Street whistleoblowers -
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ce216134-e6c7-11e3-9a20-00144feabdc0.html