But the biggest challenge was the Golden Corral, Cooper remembers. The veteran waitresses could carry an impressive total of five plates on their arms. Cooper could carry only a measly two. The manager was too nice to say anything but began gradually cutting her hours until she was almost de facto fired. So Cooper's dad bought her some weights, and she began training. Sure enough, she started to reclaim hours. "She'd rush home and put on that tacky uniform and go off to the little Golden Corral," says Cooper's mother in her most bemused Mississippi drawl. Today Cooper triumphantly recalls what the manager told her after several weeks: "I did everything I could to make you quit. You were the worst waitress I ever had," he told her. "And now you're the best."

At WorldCom, Cooper desperately needed to carry more plates. The culture was so anti-jargon that Ebbers had ordered her never to use the phrase "internal control"—shorthand for the fundamentals behind auditing—again. He said he didn't understand it, says a WorldCom employee. But that is like asking a weatherman not to use the word forecast. So Cooper huddled her small team together and planned their debut. She called Ebbers, Sullivan and a few others to a meeting in the main conference room. She was going to force them to see what an audit department could do for their bottom line.

The morning of the meeting, everyone gathered together—except Ebbers, the most important attendee. Cooper refused to start without him. After 30 painful minutes, he finally strode in, wearing his trademark sweat suit and holding a cigar, remembers an employee who was there. "What in the hell is the purpose of this meeting?" Ebbers demanded to know. Cooper, in her low, serious voice, asked him to have a seat and turned to her first slide, which defined the purpose. "He wanted to know where his next dollar was coming from," Cooper says. And she told him. Her division could find millions of dollars in wasteful operations with the use of internal controls. And indeed, over the years that followed, Cooper says, "we paid for ourselves many times over." Ebbers ended up being the last person to leave the meeting.

WorldCom started as a mom-and-pop long-distance company in 1983. But in the 1990s, it matured into a powerhouse. In 1997 it shocked the industry with an unsolicited bid to take over MCI, a company more than three times its size. In 1998 CFO Magazine named Sullivan one of the country's best CFO s. At age 37 he was earning $19.3 million a year. The next year Cooper was promoted to vice president. The stock price had gone through the roof, and she and her friends at work would sometimes talk of retiring early, taking care of their parents and starting their own businesses. Cooper harbored a girlish dream of starting a bead shop. She had even ordered a couple hundred thousand beads, which still sit in her garage.

But by early 2001, overexuberance for the telecom market had created a glut of companies like WorldCom, and earnings started to fall. Cooper was aware of the decline but not of the creative accounting fix. At WorldCom her department handled operational audits, which set company budget standards and evaluate performance, among other things. Financial audits, which verify the accuracy of a company's financial reports, were the province of the then esteemed independent firm Arthur Andersen.

It was a fluke, really, that Cooper got wind of the rotten accounting. A worried executive in the wireless division told her in March 2002 that corporate accounting had taken $400 million out of his reserve account and used it to boost WorldCom's income. But when Cooper went to Andersen to inquire about the maneuver, she was told matter-of-factly that it was not a problem. When she didn't relent, Sullivan angrily told Cooper that everything was fine and she should back off. He was furious at her, according to a person involved in the matter. Cooper, concerned that her job might be in jeopardy, cleaned out personal items from her office.

For many auditors, the word of the CFO and an Andersen partner would have been more than enough to leave the situation alone. "You have to understand," says a WorldCom employee, "Scott was probably the most respected person in the company." But, says Cooper, "when someone is hostile, my instinct is to find out why."

As the weeks went on, Cooper directed her team members to widen their net. Having watched the Enron implosion and Andersen's role in it, she was worried they could not necessarily rely on the accounting firm's audits. So they decided to do part of Andersen's job over. She and her team began working late into the night, keeping their project secret. And they had no allies. At one point, one of Cooper's employees bought a CD burner and started copying data, concerned that the information might be destroyed before they could finish. In late May, Cooper and her group discovered a gaping hole in the books. In public reports the company had categorized billions of dollars as capital expenditures in 2001, meaning the costs could be stretched out over a number of years into the future. But in fact the expenditures were for regular fees WorldCom paid to local telephone companies to complete calls and therefore were not capital outlays but operating costs, which should be expensed in full each year. It was as if an ordinary person had paid his phone bills but written down the payments as if he were building a phone tower in his backyard. The trick allowed WorldCom to turn a $662 million loss into a $2.4 billion profit in 2001.

Internal auditors, by definition, work in pursuit of a gotcha. So discoveries like this produce a strange "adrenaline rush," says a WorldCom audit employee, "and at the same time, there's a great sadness." Cooper's mother Patsy could see that the investigation had taken its toll. "I noticed a change in her countenance," she says. "There was no cadence to her speech. I noticed a lack of, well, it seemed to be energy."

On June 11, Sullivan called Cooper and gave her 10 minutes to come to his office and describe what her team was up to, says a source involved with the case. She did, and Sullivan, known for his poker face, remained calm. He then asked her to delay the audit, according to a WorldCom timeline of events filed with the sec. She told him that would not happen. The meeting was a turning point for her because she, like her colleagues in the industry, considered Sullivan the gold standard. "It was terribly disappointing," says Cooper.

The next day, Cooper told the head of the audit committee about her findings, but she still held out hope that there was a reasonable explanation. She and her team began looking for ways to somehow justify what they had found in the books. Finally, they confronted WorldCom's controller, David Myers, who admitted he knew the accounting could not be justified, according to an internal-audit memo.

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