The accounting fraud at WorldCom is like a Greek or Shakespearean tradegy, revealing human frailty and greed. But it is also a powerful story about the role of control mechanisms that can protect organizations from the actions of poorly selected senior executives.

The major goal of the case is to explore how enterprises use multiple control mechanism to deter and detect illegal behaviour. Managers are mot likely to step across ethical and legal boundaries when the preassure to perform is great. Preassure can be healthy but companies that set high-performance targets and grant large rewards for achieving these must have strong control systems to ensure that people are not tempted to cross boundaries. Identify those controls and discuss the role of each of them (use the case to illustrate how each one of them failed, and allowed a major fraud to be launched and sustained for several years at one of the largets market capitalization stocks on the NYSE)