Im glad you were able to join us today for discussing that has been in the news pretty much. A few housekeeping notes i want to make sure everybody concludes that analysts and other devices whether they are smart watches etc. Please make sure they are silent at some level. When we get to the qanda i would ask you wait for the microphone and everybody watching online. This is the way theyve come forward over the last several decades to make various allegations about government misconduct and of course we can look back at the pentagon papers for the first in 1971, the nsa five from the midtolate 1990s and early 2000 and Justice Department officials that revealed the program and of course Chelsea Manning and thereve also been as i indicated previously almost a countless number of corporate whistleblowers in the same period of Archer Daniels midland and a day uncovered the sex trafficking observation of course just this summer we had in our theaters with Kira Knightley talking about the scandal in the United States request an two d. Up to the war vote after the secrets act. How do they like to act when others do not and do the pathologies of the organizations try not to laugh. Protections for whistleblowers differ from agency to agency and from the private and Nonprofit Sector and it was started in the wake of the revelations just a bureaucratic spokesperson for cracking down. This afternoon our panel is going to help us answer these and other important questions. We have journalist and author of this book crisis of conscience whistleblowing in the age of fraud and yes he will be signing copies out here in the hallway when the event is over so those of you that are here please avail yourself of that opportunity. For the new yorker and other publications he has lived surrounded by garden groves and yes i am jealous. No question about it. To my leftist professor jennings from State University and author from st. Martins griffin and to her left specializing in the Intelligence Community and whistleblowing and this legislation and litigation you are probably wondering when are you going to talk about that some more. Before i put on in th tom in tht like to ask respectively some questions to help us contextualize our discussion. Youve written and lectured on corporate ethics or the lack thereof and in your book you cant google or anything else without its coming up s is comd an enormous impact. Walk us through essentially if you will what you have learned in the course of your study over this phenomenon and essentially the basic lesson that you have drawn from it. I think probably the most important thing you learn is that the question people ask is why did they do such bizarre things, why would somebody in a company or Government Agency do this and youll quickly learn there is a whole psychology to this and so when people do these things they honestly believe that they are doing the right thing for a number of reasons. Sometimes good intentions get in the way and its cooler here than it was their. We dont know how to deal with thain our tires dont know how o deal with it either. We all have to have a quorum present and they said can you come and do this. I have a flight at 5 30 a. M. When i left this morning i was leaving the neighborhood and the tire light came on and said inflation low, check the tire and im thinking its just the weather, and i kept driving but it started flashing and it continued. I kept going because my responsibility was to the nonprofit and those people and whatever risk i was thinking i was doing it on behalf of them. Its the kind of thing you cant fix and you have to get a whole new tire and i also say to people held him was that for me to continue driving that car. Go ahead, you can sync it and i can take it. And the pressure of the moment, human beings respond to the pressure in front of them and not pressure that will come somewhere down the line. So, if you are beholding to the cause, if you do make these kind of decisions. And another thing that i think happens that you have to take a hard look at is nobody wakes up one day and says you know what, i think i will destroy this da data. Nobody says that is the way to get the accounting straightened up. Nobody does that. What you have are a series of inconsequential decisions and particularly this kind of thing that happened. I have white collar criminals who have come to speak to me for two minutes once i want them to see that they are normal human beings, not the kind you pick out of a crowd and say this is a white collar criminal right there and the second reason is they all have a story of their initial trap. And by that, i mean they will be sitting in a meeting and ceo will Say Something like well that isnt really an issue where ive looked at that already and they havent and they know its an issue and they talked about it but every Single Person in that room who knows the says nothing. From that point on they become prisoners of each other. And it seems like the smallest of things. It isnt going to be flashed on a newspaper but it is a start. Its the adjustment of the depreciation when they know they are going down a path. And nobody says anything. From that moment on, they are prisoners. They know something about the ceo and likewise the ceo knows of their unwillingness to stop them and so you have got combination and all of them will say that it just keeps growing because they push the envelope to see how far they can get you to go along with it. And theres still another thing i call it the iconic ceo in my book and ive come to label it after the 1993 piece in the Journal Business ethics. They have no idea who that is so theres a whole line of distinguished people and it is named after king david that we cant calcant collect the datar nobody would recognize it. So in that we have a charismatic leader who probably deserved position with humble beginnings. I dont know what that is because i am not a psychologist or sociologist, but the things that happen to them they begin to take on this air of almost royalty and nobody is calling them on something as simple as their travel expenses. The. Their minds become blurred on that claim up to the top and i believe there was one sample and then i will stop because there are other things i can say that i dont want to spend the rest of the time. They have the feedback from their employees and it was a survey that opened and benefits that came through very clearly to him was you or a wire. When he told me this i was stunned because i dont know him to be a liar. He was shocked by this and disappointed so he went home that night and explained the feedback she would say because you are a lawyer. So much for marital comfort. Then she says what do you mean. Why do you think that the company asks you to get so many presentations. And he said i thought it was because i was a good presenter and she said no. Its because if the building caught fire, you would call it a controlled burn. If the boat is sinking you would say we are taking on water. The standards on the bright winds shifted and he didnt even recognize it. No one is beholden to them they were not shipped and they know when there is accounting fraud and a long climb up there and barriers and we have this almost impossible situation. We will come back and talk about what can and should be fixed. The gap was started in the wake of the scandals that came up in the 1970s. Give us a sense of what gap is about and who you deal with in that mode of operation etc. Weve been around for a little over four decades i am a National Security analyst and that means most of my work includes whistleblowers and we have a number that represents the private sector and federal government. Essentially when a whistleblower comes to us it is with a disclosure they want to make a war with a retaliation complaints theyve already made the disclosure. We talked to the supportive witnesses and we will educate them and guide them through the very treacherous waters. That will go through how they made their disclosure to see whether or not they qualify for certain types of protections under the Whistleblower Statutes and regulations and then try to challenge the retaliation and work with congress or the media. We work every once in a while here to make sure that they are protected now we come to our author. Your first book was called extra virginity which is about all of oil into the industrial aspect of it and how it goes from olives to your cabinet. Who can i trust here to buy from and how did you go from olive oil to whistleblowers the widespread food systems stock Just Olive Oil and obfuscating the passages of the middleman creating products that were not what they said on the label. Why i tackled whistleblowing is because of the characters of the whistleblowers and the characters of a their advocates and a number of other people. Everyone on this site is included. It was a story about people, good guys, bad guys and truly saintly individuals. Whistleblowinthe whistleblowingt and i followed my instincts and found a remarkable cast of characters in a wide range of Different Industries and walks of life whose stories i think capture something important about the place we are right now in our society and again and again they said to me i hate this word whistleblower. I was just doing my job and i think that almost orwellian shift we are going to College Truth teller and person of conscience a special thing as if all of us aspire to that and that grabbed me. It helped me long enough to write a book. And what about the entomology of the term because you go into that talking about the origins of it. Walk us through that. Is one o its one of those chicken or egg questions because quite often it isnt clear exactly how the term came together and sometimes both whistle and blow could be used in a way for revealing information onthefly quite often to do harm and then theres the british bobby blowing the whistle when they see something running away then there is the alternate theory of the empir empire on the field we whistle when there is a foul. No one actually knows for sure. Its probably all of the above sort of constellation of meaning. As other countries where the term is bellringer or white house keeper and i think that the whistleblower may not be the ideal way to capture the act of conscience and telling of the truth but they are separated because it is in deeply embedded into the wall that you need to choose and consciously say i am a whistleblower and this statute protects me. Let lets get down to a few cases. Tell us about alan jones in big pharma. When we are talking about people whom it is a pleasure to know and an inspiration to spend time with i spent the better part of ten days with him in his cabin and the pennsylvania was learning about his story. First three days were fairly quiet and then he thought he could trust me and gaining trust is one of the critical things of getting people to tell their stories fully. Explaining why they do what they do, he was an investigator in the Pennsylvania State office of the Inspector General. He happened to find that they received a 2,000 check and in an account that was not registered, no official owner of the account and the check was signed by the subsidiary of Johnson Johnson then he started looking at what it was others were doing paying money to this man. Gradually, he is a great investigator, truly impressive in its decatur and he gradually started putting the pieces together saying the Bigger Picture of whats going on here and what was going on is that the companies were systematically corrupting the state Health Officials to make sure that their highly toxic and extremely powerful secondgeneration antipsychotic medicine was the medicine of choice for a wide range. This drug is called respirable and its infamous at this point, a wide range of conditions for which it was never cleared by the fda. They started in texas with something they called t. Map and they closed that in 20 other states and then pennsylvania was the last of the states. Billions of dollars of overspending for drugs but ultimately turned out to be either ineffective or extremely harmful. Some of the side effects dont bear thinking about. Ultimately there was a settlement thanks to alan jones putting together a couple of boxes of information and then trying to convince people he had a story. Now if the games when they begie out not only did the pharmaceutical companies resist his attempts to out this information but his own Inspector General clamps down on him so we have private and public sources to muscle the story. Said to be clear wit within s office in the state of pennsylvania, the office that this was to be part of the regulatory scheme, is this something that the head of the office into their own initiative or was there an outside political pressure that was being brought to bear to influence the outcome . It seemed very clear that the governor at the time had made clear very probusiness, very antifraud investigation. He started under his watch active flails were being destroyed, anything that was being closed and covered up. Was there an actual direct link that was ever proven in any of this and i ask that because in the kind of work that i do, i was obsessed with documents, always obsessed with documents because its a lot harder for people to say its hearsay which one of the things to a certain degree they have to overcome. So was there any smoking gun so to speak or was this handled in ways there was not a paper trail . The circumstantial evidence is very strong. They stop being controlling every meeting and files start getting shredded so it was a fairly clear set of circumstances but there was no direct link and some may not even have known about this particular case as theyve had problems destroying old case files which is a terrible way to do investigative work but its good if you dont want people connecting the path. Alan jones had to fight off his own office which sort of retaliated against him, threatened him, fired him eventually then he had to find someone to take the case that he knew was extreme important. He is someone one of the characters in the whistleblowers easy it again and again the ability to empathize with the ultimate victim they look through the spreadsheetspreadsheet sent a lh the pep talks as their bonus payments and safest drug that wt we are making or that im allowing to be sold is hurting people, this is causing harm and the next statement i often hear is what what if that was your mother taking the drug or your brother. Strong and epic statements that make some help them pierced the veil of corporate or government and say actually somebody is going to be very badly hurt so on his own recognizance, no job in this cabin and with no money come he shopped around to different attorneys general where the scheme was being perpetrated and he finally found someone to listen in texas and this wonderful woman who was part of the attorney and the Attorney Generals Office into finally heard him and he remembers the moment is the moment of lists where, okeefe is her name, he comes down from pennsylvania and looks like walker texas ranger which is a popular chuck norris. He is sitting here telling me whats going on down here in texas and she said i thought it was impossible to level up from doing he was talking about seemed an possible. However, she felt it was her duty to start investigating sushi started and they have 200 boxes of data from the company. Millions of pages and they spent a year and a half going over this stuff and sure enough alan jones was right and she said its a tribute to his ability as an investigator that the scheme he identified with a handful of document proved in every detail he described to be correct. I want to pause the discussion and go back to marianne. What were the people thinking when they were writing these checks . To this pharmacist in pennsylvania. The psychological tools, everybody does it come of this is the way that its always been done and if we dont do this this is what happens to the company. They go through this whole sort of mantra of things that just fail over time and it started with one check and then it continued to grow and they have that immunity where they think theyve done so well. We still continue to give them immunity for recalling the tylenol it drives me crazy when i see that story again and again people say this is true Corporate Responsibility and i know that there are other instances where they did far more harm. I think it is the same thing i talked about you have people who are aware of it but its just part of the system, its part of the way we do things and i call it the sandbox i think you have a big one in washington, d. C. But it is like children. When you are in a sandbox there are certain rules that you play by and parents will look at it t than to say nonand say none of t have you tossing and turning and these people operate under this and when someone comes in or someone with them says wait a minute why are you doing this, im dating myself terribly but its like when he came in and said what are you doing here, selling evidence, taking bribes, what are you doing and they looked at him and said we are not the problem, you are because they progressed in this world, theyve been rewarded, they are recognized. Nobody is saying we should take a look at this end of the people that do as they often say to the companies how do you treat the people so far down the plaque and there isnt a whistleblower that says im a little bit worried about this because how do you respond to them and then my next question is when is the last time you promoted someone who did throw down the flood because those are the symbols to people who you hire and fire and discipline and to promote. Then i have to ask how many have you found where the person throwing the flag or the color is rewarded were held as validated . I found one. They were just idiots. They decided to merge with a company that was nothing but a gigantic fraud. One of the people in accounting figured out about it and he went to their ceo and said this is what theyve done and he had to go out there publicly and say because it was a huge merger at the time he had to go out there and say this is what is going on we are going to fix it and then he has a better position because they had to get out of there so that all worked out for him, but they promoted the man who had done that to a very high level position. So, that is the one story i know about where he sent the signal and i think that maybe another one. There were two things that bothered him and that is when all of the executives were driving we are going to cut that ou out we are driving forwd into the next thing he thought he is nobody is telling me negative stuff. In one of his first meetings he needs to be said i need to tell you what keeps you up at night, tell me your problems. He said no one gets out of here until i hear something so finally one did an dead end afte meeting he promoted him to send it through the culture. He wasnt really a whistleblower but its close enough. It reminds me of asking as ive asked many times how do you deal with whistleblowers or think they should be handled people have different positions and of course they are important sources of information on the frontlines and you need to Pay Attention and capture the information and work on that and then i say how do you deal with whistleblowers in your organization and this kind of a blink and they look at me and say we dont have whistleblowers in our organization. Its truly a disconnect. They are out there but no one sitting next to me in my organization as a whistleblower. They are just disgruntled, they cant see that its a universal problem that if they are close to home all of a sudden they are threatening and may not be the ideal whistleblower in your mind. That kind of brings us back. We paused the story where he gets a moment o that moment of n where officials in texas they keys right. It goes to an intense trial for whom im grateful for the data on this case and after three days johnson and johnson threw in the towel. A large payment to the state of texas and to his legal team. How many dollars went to those that actually suffered here how many people went to the reform schools, hospitals, various other structures of the state and everyone else that were given these horribly dangerous drugs. There was an opportunity to end the corporate environment with h the accepted outcome of the illegal settlement its an exchange of money and signing documents that allow both of them to say they are innocent or we are right in the fueling of certain documents which is extremely pro event. It was a good outcome than allowing them the National Settlement to go ahead, and again at the end of the day thanks to allen and several other whistleblowers they coughed up 2. 2 billion for the settlement. During the course of this wrong doing, 25 billion. We have a major problem and that was a success story. We have a major problem in terms of what we are allowing to be signed away. I dont want the healthcare side of this to necessarily dominate, but you have another example in the book that essentially involves a nonprofit hospital and if i recall it is halifax hospital. The person in question found an issue by the name of edward allen. We can ask her for the proper pronunciation. Maybe we should get you a chair. [laughter] shall i let him tell your story clicks she came to america and did the american dream, work incredibly hard, worked three jobs to earn her way with great delight. She was super proud of the hospital and the work she was doing. She made her way up the ladder and she did finance for a while and then ended up in compliance which requires you to look at concerns being raised through the organization and easily read them to what extent are they credible and actionable and at that point she began to realize that there was a major problem and disconnect between the hospital rhetoric of the support system. The wrongdoing she was noticing was investing in surgeries and overbilling and the she did everything she could and believed he. Im findin finding the same goos to say you make of jail. You have to really explore the psychology and in my field there are all types of whistleblowers. There are other people who look at it and say that isnt right for those are those who do it for a living. We had protests every day. I told the company i dont care how much you argue, lets just do this and we will see. It was supposed to take a week. It was just i an exasperation ty are professional whistleblowers. Where are the essentials of business talking about, they are not all angels. I think they cost the credibility of the sincere ones. They had their ceo and associate general counsel offering altars and that would have been it for me. At the same thin time she knew t was happening to the patient and she did what we tell the students to do when you are in this organization, ask if you can eat an agent of change should. It can only be changed from the outside. Johnson and johnson went on to do other things and that is true with other companies. For your own sanity and dedication, you dont care anymore but i ask them to at least a organized a group to a higher order. His dedication was i cant believe this is dishonest. I have to look at myself in the mirror every morning and that is a very powerful thing. They spend a lot of time getting to the point i dont have a choice. Im a good lawyer and listener. You begin to doubt your own sanity because everyone else seems to think its okay. The support its good to have this and walls but if you dont have the stamina to keep you on your feet. What a scandal did you uncover . He was called to fix problems that the leadership or funding will bfindingwere not being deae Logistics Base divvied codebase. There was a junkyard in hundreds of people were dying to. You undercut these big defense contractor projects and those are good money for your present their products. It has a great happy ending to the government project that has been able to negotiate and explain the train the marine corps and other offices and a. The unnecessary diane stopped a. The. Human rights watch has a report in one of the biggest problems is a the rest of the government of the whistleblower doesnt have to prove that they were against it instead on the government. They were fired for their disclosure and not how Little Things they cannot fire a. We are hopeful. What has changed since the First Edition came out . I realized these are the ones that are all in trouble and then when i took a deeper look. If you want to corrupt people in an organization with which to do flex. Without the backdrop of ethics if you see in the to have. It doesnt matter if it is the va. People at the airbus without the design and i remember an artic article. Im sure there were women involved. I have to be careful with. You can still hear it today i was i corporate call and i heard every single cliche and infiltrated it without regards to ethics and i think that comes through that fundamentally we have shifted. This is dangerous and you have to tell them that. We fundamentally shifted away but today intellectual way. Maybe the word integrity shows up once in a while a. Do any of the three of you think theres any connection between organizational size, for example, and the likelihood of pathology in the time we have been discussing. We dont need any corporations. You have the chain of responsibility and a series of activities that are more and more disassociated with the ultimate goal and you have a mission and you can talk about your stock price instead of what youre actually doing. Theres all these ways of making a numbers game instead of facing the game. What are we doing. On the planet. So there are some big organizations that are not corrupt in some small organizations that are highly but i think as a general principle but because it gets, the bigger the threat. The frontline is more detached than those making the decision and its harder to get the information out there. There are barriers along the way and the information gets filtered along the way. The frontline sees the issue but then it is characterized until okay, well i dont see that as a big deal. The on the principle that you cannot disassociate yourself and then at any rate, the two military principles that someone cannot