Written by Kylie Akins
For the majority of his life, Bill Owens lived by a pride and self-reliance that often characterized the successful American businessman – until the night he held a loaded pistol to his own head. His life was crumbling in his hands, and that night, after a career of deceit, he put down the gun, prayed to God and resolved to expose the fraud he had helped commit within the company he worked for: HealthSouth.Owens, a CFO, participant and whistleblower in the HealthSouth scandal, and Gerry Kelly, a 1974 Harding graduate who became the leading FBI agent in the investigation against HealthSouth, teamed up in their first presentation together to address Harding students about the warning signs and consequences of fraud in an event hosted by the Paul R. Carter College of Business Administration on Oct. 11.Bryan Burks, dean of the College of Business, said he believes Owens’ story to be especially pertinent to students on the Harding campus.”It was just a very powerful story,” Burks said. “Bill Owens was a good man, religious, knew about Jesus his whole life, heavily involved in church, but he wore a mask his entire life.”Owens addressed more than 500 people in attendance, saying he hoped to warn students.”I am not here seeking your sympathy in any way, because quite simply, I don’t deserve it,” Owens said. “I did it. I knew it was wrong. Why I am here is to explain what happened, and hopefully through you hearing my story, you’ll be able to make better decisions than the ones I made.”Owens began working with HealthSouth, one of the nation’s largest healthcare providers specializing in outpatient rehabilitation, in 1986, when the company was still private and small, seeking to go public.However, due to high expectations from Wall Street to maintain steady, predictable growth, former CEO Richard Scrushy and the company’s CFOs, including Owens, began an aggressive accounting strategy that allowed them to report more revenue each quarter than they had actually earned.Step by step, the company became entrenched in fraud within the year, and their scheme remained unnoticed for 15 years. However, in 2002, the FBI began investigating HealthSouth employees for what they thought was insider trading. Unbeknownst to the FBI, the agents were on the fringes of a $2.7 billion scandal.Owens was faced with a decision: commit perjury or tell the truth. He went to Kelly and began to tear down the deceit he had helped build within the company.In 2005, Owens was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. After serving 43 months in prison, losing his wife to divorce and being estranged from his children, he was released in March of this year to continue his sentence on probation.Since then, he has dedicated much of his time to sharing the story of the night he recommitted his life to Jesus and to informing professionals and students on the importance of business ethics.”It was pretty brave of them, especially the man who was in prison, to come out and just own what he did,” senior marketing major Hailey Fletcher said. “The main point I got was to watch out for the small things. It starts out being asked to do one little thing, and it just grows and grows.”Kelly used the scandal as a warning against a growing problem in the U.S., especially in white collar business, and commented on the snowballing effect of a small decision motivated by money.”We have a terrible cancer in our society today: greed,” Kelly said. “The root cause of crime today, the root cause of a lot of our problems in the country today comes right out of the Bible: the love of money.”Though Owens and Kelly were on different sides of the law in the scandal, they came to the same conclusion: It is not worth it.”There is nothing you can do, there is no amount of money you can make, there is no honor you can achieve that can make losing your freedom worthwhile, because until it happens to you, you can’t grasp it,” Owens said. “Losing your freedom is an awful thing.”
