The WorldCom scandal was a major accounting scandal that came to light in the summer of 2002 at WorldCom, the USA's second largest long-distance telephone company at the time. From 1999 to 2002, senior executives at WorldCom led by founder and CEO Bernard Ebbers orchestrated a scheme to inflate earnings in order to maintain WorldCom's stock price.[1] The fraud was uncovered in June 2002 when the company's internal audit unit, led by vice president Cynthia Cooper, discovered over $3.8 billion of fraudulent balance sheet entries. Eventually, WorldCom was forced to admit that it had overstated its assets by over $11 billion. At the time, it was the largest accounting fraud in American history.