Pavlo To Discuss Ethics, Fraud In Visit To WKU March 5

March 02, 2007

Bowling Green, Ky. - Walt Pavlo, a former corporate executive who was convicted of fraud, will be speaking to students in Western Kentucky University’s Gordon Ford College of Business on Monday (March 5).

 The Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) and the Center for Professional Selling will host a student reception with Pavlo from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. in Grise Hall, room 240. Pavlo will give an open campus speech on “Work Environment and Ethics” from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the Grise Hall Auditorium, Room 235.

After securing a prestigious MBA, Pavlo secured a senior position at communications giant MCI. He began working in the collections department and hit the job with ferocious intent.

But soon the pressures of work began to mount, and he struggled to meet the targets set before him. For the first time in his life, he began to stare the possibility of failure in the face. He told a colleague about his struggle. His colleague’s response proved the pivotal moment in his career. “His comment to me was that everybody is cheating,” Pavlo said. “That’s the way you make it.”

Over the course of six months, Pavlo and his colleague skimmed more than $6 million in kickbacks from MCI’s poorest-performing clients and stashed the money away in a Grand Cayman bank account.

In 2001, Pavlo was convicted of fraud and for nearly the next four years was known as prisoner 52071019.

Today Pavlo has reinvented his career by speaking to many corporations, professional societies, universities and even the FBI about what made him make the choices he did.

For information on Pavlo’s visit to WKU, contact Krist Schell at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at (270) 745-6864 or krist.schell@wku.edu.

More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.

For information, contact Krist Schell at (270) 745-6864.