Eileen Foster Case Summary

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Eileen Foster was the Executive Vice President of Fraud Risk Management at Countrywide, and later served in the role of Senior Vice President of the Mortgage Fraud Investigation Division at Bank of America after the two companies merged (Foster, n.d.). It was her responsibility to investigate mortgage origination fraud and reporting suspicious activity to regulators and the company’s Board of Directors. After several years of seeing a lot of suspicious activity and blatant acts of fraud she found that the company was playing party to this activity. Any employee who reported fraud and wrongdoing to Employee Relations were being transferred, demoted, harassed or terminated. When Foster reported her concerns to Countrywide’s Internal audit to investigate, the company not only chose to conceal her allegations from Bank of America, but it also directed employee relations to investigate Foster for wrong doing. She was eventually …show more content…

Instead, she wanted to ensure that the corruption was uncovered and exposed (Hudson, 2011). According to Hudson (2011), she filed a Sarbanes-Oxley Act whistleblower complaint with OSHA challenging the company’s right to fire her. In 2011, she won her wrongful termination whistleblower complaint against Bank of America (Froomkin, n.d.). The Department of Labor ruled at that time that Bank of America, which bought Countrywide in 2008 had fired Eileen Foster, as punishment for finding and reporting fraud and for trying to protect other whistleblowers within the company (Whistleblowers ignored, 2011). According to recent articles Bank of America was ordered to reinstate her position and pay $930,000 worth of damages (Hudson, 2011). The company wasn’t going down without a fight so they appealed and another hearing happened in October 2012 where Foster was represented by the Government Accountability Project (Eileen Foster-Whistleblowers,

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