Four months had passed since the raid, and we still knew very little about what was going on. I continued to feel confident that as the government investigators worked their way through the documents and interviewed people in the company, they would realize that Bobby and his group were the only ones who had done anything wrong. The headlines had stopped, and everything was relatively back to normal in our daily lives. Randy came down to Alachua once or twice, as did a few members of his team. Since we didn’t know what case the government was trying to build, and they had taken all the documents from 1997 through 2003, there was not much legal work we could be doing. The only thing the executives could do was start getting our attorneys up to speed regarding our business and personal histories.
Randy selected a South Carolina attorney for me, John Simmons, and shortly thereafter John came down to see me. I was very impressed with him. John had been the U.S. attorney for South Carolina in the past and was now in private practice. As we spent the day together, and he saw what I had built over the years with the business and the Temple, he grew more and more dismayed at what was going on. He told me he knew the prosecutor leading the investigation, and she was a fine, intelligent woman. Like everyone else involved, John wondered how Bobby had managed to pull her into his world.
Randy told me that these large, white-collar investigations were measured in years, not months. He said there wasn’t much for us to do until the government investigators had worked through what they had seized and were prepared to discuss their case. He did say that we could contact the prosecutor to inquire about my status on the list. I was shocked to learn I was one of the chief targets of the investigation. This did not surprise Randy. The government was head-hunting, and because I had been the CEO, that put me on the top of the list. Regardless, I continued to believe that since they weren’t going to find anything, I had nothing to worry about. I believed that in the end, truth would triumph.
In the meantime, the company moved forward aggressively with its defense. A firm was hired to finish off the internal investigation of Bobby’s kickback schemes. Just because he had somehow managed to get the government on his side didn’t mean that he hadn’t stolen from the company. In addition, the company set out to show that it was not true that there was rampant accounting fraud going on in the company. The board hired a forensic accounting firm to perform a detailed audit of revenue and earnings of the Medical Manager Practice Services Division for the entire year of 2001. As a public company, it was very important to protect WebMD from getting pulled into this mess. Fortunately, they were successful.
As part of isolating the company from the investigation of the individual Medical Manager executives, in July 2004, I stepped down as CEO of the division. Later that year, as the investigation heated up, I also stepped down from WebMD’s board of directors. I saw this as another act of surrender of the personal in order to serve what life was doing. I just relaxed and let go of whatever resistance came up inside of me. That is how I had been handling this entire ordeal, and it made that period of my life a profound and powerful part of my spiritual journey.
January 2005 brought the next major step in the process. The government accepted plea agreements from Bobby Davids and two of his collaborators in the kickback schemes. These people agreed to pay restitutions to the company, and Bobby agreed to serve a year and a day in prison. Not bad, considering when it was all said and done he admitted to stealing $5.4 million in fifty-three kickback schemes over a five-year period. The only charge Bobby Davids and the others faced was one count of mail fraud.
The rest of us were pretty much beside ourselves. It didn’t bode well for us that the government was willing to let these people off so lightly in exchange for their testimony against us. We had also found that Bobby had been having an affair with a woman in the accounting department. She was a CPA and the comptroller for the dealer acquisitions program. To a large part, it was her cooperation that allowed Bobby to get his schemes past accounting, the auditors, and the executives. Yet she was not charged at all. It was at that point that I started to realize just how much the cards were stacked against us. The government was letting admittedly guilty people go in order to get their testimony. These people were just pointing up the ladder to get the spotlight off themselves. Regardless, the story in the papers read that some Medical Manager executives had pleaded guilty to being involved in accounting fraud, and more people were likely to be charged. The whole thing was a PR nightmare for WebMD and the Medical Manager Practice Services Division. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was hurt the company. After twenty-five years of committed service, it was time to resign. On February 9, 2005, I sent my resignation letter to WebMD’s CEO. It may well be the only resignation letter written under these circumstances that was ever signed, “With great love and respect.” I meant every word of it.
I was amazed that after all those years my inner state was not affected by leaving the company. I woke up the next morning, went to the Temple as I always did, then walked up to the old Personalized Programming office building on Temple grounds. That building had been converted into a house, but no one was living there. My old office had been used as a study, and it still had the same desk and furniture as fifteen years earlier. I found that I was just as comfortable with this office as I was with the executive suite down the road. In fact, I was more comfortable. I had always liked simplicity; that’s why I had moved out to the woods in the first place. Sitting quietly in that office, I could see that this terrible situation was bringing about amazing changes—both inside and out. Life had always done that to me, and accepting those changes was my great experiment. I knew that this attack by the government was no exception. I just had to be willing to go wherever it took me.
In the meantime, I had been given the space to begin writing the books I always knew I was going to write. There were two of them: The first would impart what I had learned since first noticing my mental voice talking while I was sitting on that couch so many years ago. It would be a journey back to the seat of Self that could be taken by anyone in the world. It was to be called The Untethered Soul. The second book would be the stories of the miraculous flow of events that happened over the years as I let go and let life unfold naturally. It would be called The Surrender Experiment. I couldn’t start that book yet, because I had no idea how this latest chapter would play out. So in the midst of all this change and uncertainty, I began working on The Untethered Soul.
Karen Entner had lived at the Temple for more than fifteen years. She had grown into a management position at Medical Manager where she was a phenomenally productive employee. As head of the documentation and computer-based training departments, she had been writing under my supervision for years. Shortly after I left the company, she expressed an interest in helping with my book. So now I had a book to write and the perfect person to assist with the process. The Temple, the book, and periodic conversations with Randy and his team kept me plenty busy for the rest of the year.
By November 2005, a full two years after the raid, Randy was hearing that an indictment was imminent. He and some of the other attorneys demanded to see evidence tying their clients to a crime. The result was that Randy sent me a one-inch-thick stack of documents that the government intended to use to prove I was behind Bobby’s activities.
I was very interested in getting to study this material, yet at the same time I was somewhat apprehensive. After only a few hours, I was flabbergasted. I did not see anything in these documents that incriminated me. There were some accounting reports on a few acquisitions Bobby had done, but most of the rest were handwritten notes my assistant, Sandy, had taken during our twice weekly executive calls. On these notes, the FBI had circled pretty much every reference to any discussions we had about meeting our quarterly revenue and earnings projections. Sandy had scribbled my name next to some of the comments or suggestions. That was about it. I was both relieved and concerned. I was relieved because, as I suspected, they didn’t find anything indicating I had done anything wrong. I felt concerned because they were obviously considering these circled documents as evidence against me. I didn’t know what to think, so I called Randy.
Randy told me that everyone who had looked at the documents had the same reaction—there was nothing in them that tied me to any wrongdoing. Randy explained that it didn’t matter. Bobby had said that the accounting fraud he had been involved in was for the purpose of meeting Wall Street’s numbers. These documents would be used to show motive. The government prosecutors would argue that since I wanted to meet Wall Street’s expectations, I allowed Bobby to do things improperly. Motive was one of the pieces the government needed in order to try to build a case against me. But this wasn’t just happening to me. Randy told me that every one of the other executives, and their attorneys, had the same reaction to the materials they were given.
Just one month later, on December 19, 2005, Randy received notification from the U.S. Marshals Office in Columbia, South Carolina, that a federal indictment had been issued—I was under arrest. Along with nine other prior executives of Medical Manager Corporation, I was to turn myself in to the federal authorities at an arraignment on December 28 in Charleston, South Carolina. The summons read:
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA V. MICHAEL A. SINGER