Whistleblower Exposes Merrill Lynch in New Book, Launches Facebook Page

Keith Schooley, a former financial consultant trainee at Merrill Lynch, has launched an official Facebook page for his book, Merrill Lynch: The Cost Could Be Fatal, a first-person account of his nine-year battle with the Wall Street giant. The page is now live, and Schooley is asking readers who follow the case—and anyone who believes employees should be able to report wrongdoing without losing their careers—to like and share it. Every share helps put the account in front of new readers. Schooley joined Merrill Lynch in July 1991 in a small Oklahoma branch, scored 93.2 percent on the Series 7 exam, and ranked among the top ten rookie producers in his division. Fourteen months later, he was out of the securities industry for good.

The book’s title comes from the firm’s own general counsel, who warned in a 1992 employee publication that letting integrity take second place to revenue would cost the firm more than dollars: “The cost could be fatal.” Citing the firm’s written requirement that employees report improprieties to whatever level of management is necessary, Schooley wrote a four-page memo to his branch manager and then a 31-page letter to all thirteen members of the board of directors. What followed, as Schooley tells it, was two internal investigations, inquiries by the SEC, the NYSE, the NASD, and two state insurance departments, his own termination, a forced move into binding securities arbitration, a four-day hearing, and more than a decade of appeals. The arbitration panel awarded him nothing. Schooley does not hide that result. The book opens with a foreword by his former attorney, Stephen Jones, who states plainly that Schooley lost and argues that the real subject is not one man’s case but whether investors should have claims decided by arbitrators rather than juries. Jones tells readers that each of them becomes “one of the jurors he never had.” The book reconstructs the dispute from Schooley’s memos, letters, regulatory correspondence, recorded telephone conversations, and the transcript of the arbitration hearing, including testimony from the firm’s own compliance and legal executives. Schooley grew up in Oklahoma City, earned a B.B.A. from the University of Oklahoma and an M.B.A. from Oklahoma State University, and worked in oil and gas before turning to Wall Street. He lives in Enid, Oklahoma. The Facebook page can be found at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61595113281885, and the book is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKY222R6.