Senator Charles Grassley believes WorldCom executives, both past and present, should return some of their bonuses to bolster the finances of the ailing company. Grassley says senior management treated WorldCom like a “personal piggybank” while thousands of workers will lose their jobs because of gross mismanagement. Grassley wants the Securities and Exchange Commission to get a list of all the bonuses paid to executives at WorldCom, which disclosed last week that it hid about four billion dollars of expenses to inflate profits. Grassley says the federal government, though, can’t compel the executives to return the money.But Grassley hopes the new C-E-O of WorldCom would try to get the money back. Grassley wants the S-E-C to start doing spot-checks of accounting practices at publicly traded companies. He says WorldCom problems might have been caught earlier had such a system been in place.
