Sherron Watkins Justified? The Debacle

¶ … Sherron Watkins justified?

The debacle of the financial meltdown of Enron caused tremendous suffering to many innocent investors and employees at the company. Any action that helped bring to light the company's deceitful account practices and its manipulation of the energy industry known to the world cannot be regretted. But Sherron Watkins was not a whistleblower in the traditional sense. She did not risk her personal financial security and vocational future for the greater good. When Watkins wrote a now-infamous anonymous memo detailing irregularities at Enron, she did not make her memo public "until congressional investigators released it six weeks after Enron filed for bankruptcy" (Ackman 2002).

Watkins' memo was an attempt to engage in damage control and was self-serving rather than selfless. It was concerned that Enron had become a dangerous place to work for managers, not that it was engaged in illicit practices. Her memo framed the problems at Enron as a public relations issue, not an ethical one. Moreover, she engaged in $47,000 of insider trades of Enron stock after writing her memo to CEO Kenneth Lay "and prior to the company's announcement of the charge to earnings," an action she herself acknowledged was illegal because "I had more information than the marketplace did" (Kirkendall 2006).

Prosecutors were forced to deal with Watkins because they had little choice: to prosecute criminals often requires doing business with individuals of questionable morals and ethics. But this does not make Watkins a whistleblower -- she was merely one of the smaller fish in a company filled with people who were even less ethical than herself. Thus the real question is not: was Sherron Watkins justified, but was Sherron Watkins a whistleblower at all?