Want fewer ads?

Sherron Watkins born August 28, 1959) was Vice President of Corporate Development at the Enron Corporation. She is considered by many to be the whistleblower who helped to uncover the Enron scandal in 2001.

It has been remarked that her actions cannot be considered whistleblowing in a strict sense, because she only wrote a concerned internal email message to Enron CEO Kenneth Lay warning him of potential whistleblowers in the company and pointing out that there were misstatements in the financial reports. Her memo did not reach the public until five months after it was written. Dan Ackman argued in Forbes Magazine and in the Wall Street Journal that, for this reason, her actions did not constitute whistleblowing and actually helped provide legal cover for Lay.

She testified before committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate at the beginning of 2002 and was selected as one of three "People of the Year 2002" by Time. (The two whistleblowers who joined her as "People of the Year" were Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom and Coleen Rowley of the FBI.)

Watkins was born in Tomball, Texas. She had joined Enron in 1993, having worked for Arthur Andersen the previous eight years. She departed from Enron in November 2002. Since then she has been giving speeches at management congresses and has co-written a book about her experiences at Enron and the problems of the US corporate culture.

Watkins holds a Bachelor of Business Administration (with honors) from the University of Texas, where she was a member of Alpha Chi Omega sorority, and a Masters of Professional Accounting. She is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA).

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Sherron Watkins", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0