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and external to the organization (Mendonca, 2001).

Ebbers poor leadership skills certainly hurt the moral fabric of Worldcom and created an environment that encouraged unethical behavior. Secrecy and lying to employees took place by top executives in order to cover up their actions. Codes of ethics were never created, or governed any of the actions by the CEO and CFO of the company. This corporate culture gave corruption a chance to fester and grow within the organization. Since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act had not been enacted, Worldcom's CEO was able to deny knowledge of the accounting scandal. However, he was unable to deny many things that were late uncovered by the SEC and an MCI internal auditing team. Bernie Ebbers had been found to have borrowed over $360 million from the company to recoup personal losses, as well as other loans including a $100 million dollar ranch on Canada, $658 million for the purchase of Mississippi timberlands, and a $14 million Georgia shipyard.

These irregularities and fraudulent accounting tricks were uncovered first by MCI's internal auditing team who were tipped off by concerned employees. At the end of the investigation, it was found that Worldcom had accounting irregularities of over $11 billion (Young, 2004). "On March 2,2004 Bernie Ebbers, WorldCom's ex-Chief Executive Officer, was charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, securities fraud, and falsely filing with the sec and on May 24,2004 six additional counts were filed against him. In August 2002, Scott Sullivan, CFO, was indicted by a grand jury on one count of fraud and six counts of securities fraud and false filings involving almost $8 billion (Davidson, 2004). Scharff (2005) believes that the unethical behaviors and practices of Worldcom were created by groupthink. Groupthink is defined as a "mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, and the members override any motivation to appraise alternative courses of action" (Drucker, 1981).

Examples given by Drucker include the decisions by the United States during the Bay of Pigs invasion and the decision to escalate the war in Vietnam. Though groupthink may have led to these decisions being made, it may not serve as an excuse for Worldcom executives to have created such an unethical corporate culture. The Worldcom scandal is one of the biggest accounting scandals that had ever taken place. It involved textbook examples of poor corporate culture, as well as, unethical

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