"Oh my!" Gene Morse was stunned. He stared at the computer screen in his cubicle, unable to believe that he had found an unsupported entry for $500 million in computer acquisitions. He immediately took his discovery to his supervisor, Cynthia Cooper, vice president for internal audit at WorldCom. "Keep going," directed Cooper. Her team of internal auditors kept digging. They worked late into the night to avoid detection, concerned that they would be fired if superiors found out what they were doing. They burned data onto CDs because they feared the data might be destroyed.

Major frauds often begin at the top, and such was the case at WorldCom. Bernie Ebbers, WorldCom's founder and CEO, had told Cooper not to use the term "internal controls" claiming that he did not understand it. However, Cooper fought for respect and more resources for the internal audit department. She told Ebbers that her division could save millions of dollars of wasteful operations with internal controls. In the years that followed, "we paid for ourselves many times over" said Cooper.

As she pursued the trail of fraud, Cooper was obstructed at every turn. In late May 2002, Cooper's team found a gaping hole in the books. The company had recorded billions of dollars of regular fees paid to local telephone companies as capital assets. This accounting trick allowed the company to turn a $662 million loss into a $2.4 billion profit in 2001. The company's CFO, Scott Sullivan, called her to his office and asked her what they were up to. He then asked her to delay her investigation to the following quarter, but she refused. In June 2002, the company announced that it had inflated assets by $3.8 billion, the largest accounting fraud in history. When the investigation was complete, the total amount of the fraud had grown to an astonishing $11 billion.