For her part, Watkins said at the NYSSCPA meeting that a better strategy than paying whistle-blowers would be to incentivize corporate risk managers and internal auditors —who are not eligible for whistle-blowing awards under Dodd-Frank — by giving them stronger voices and meaningful guarantees that they will be listened to. She added that much fraud would be eliminated if companies were required to pay CEOs all in cash, so they would not be tempted to "cook the books" in order to win potentially lucrative stock options.
And despite the lure of a huge payday, it will continue to be the case, Watkins suggested, that many who could blow whistles will keep quiet for fear of losing their jobs or wrecking their companies. Further, they fear being stamped with a "troublemaker" label that will make finding a new corporate job extremely difficult, as most whistle-blowers have found out.
On that point, Zuckerman agrees with Watkins. "She has a good point," he says. "High-level corporate people who are aware of fraud would probably earn more over their careers if they kept their jobs rather than blowing the whistle."
Reader CommentsDisplaying 1 of 1
Cameron Nabeel
Mar 2, 2011 2:59 AM ET
Whistle-blower
Very informative and nice article on whistle-blower. If you see professionally, its against the professional code of … more
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