The Informant! Whistle-blowing Madness

The Informant! is a new movie based on the book The Informant: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald. For two reviews, click here and here. I saw the movie recently.

I remember the price-fixing scandal that brought the enormous (now reformed) Archer Daniels Midland (“supermarket to the world”) to its knees. Of interest from an employment law perspective, it involved a whistle-blower, Mark Whitacre (played by Matt Damon), whose story I didn’t fully remember.

Mark Whitacre was the youngest vice president at ADM, making big bucks and looking at a bright future. At first, it seemed that Whitacre just wanted to do the right thing as he cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in its effort to prove ADM’s wrongdoing. He’s one of those rare people with the courage to take on a corporate behemoth at great personal risk.

As it turns out, Whitacre was positively crazy. Part of what he said was true, and the FBI couldn’t have broken ADM without him. Whitacre was also, however, a pathological liar who had routinely violated the law himself. In the end, both ADM executives running the price-fixing scheme and Whitacre went to jail.

Whistle-blowing is not for the faint of heart. Even if you’re a saint, you’ll be part of an ordeal that makes good and evil hard to separate. Mark Whitacre was already nuts when he started whistle-blowing. Some whistle-blowers claim they were driven crazy by the pressure cooker they found themselves in once scandal began to unfold.

The law recognizes the importance of whistle-blowing. It protects whistle-blowers. Even in the case of Mark Whitacre, justice was served because he blew the whistle. It would be a mistake for executives and other company representatives to view The Informant! as confirming their preconceived notion that all whistle-blowers are mentally ill. Employers who blow off whistle-blowers do so at their peril.