ay bar the company from future federal contracts unless it tightens internal financial controls and bolsters its ethics training. The federal government is MCI's biggest customer, accounting for about $1 billion in annual sales. But after investigating, the agency later had a change of heart, and on January 7, the GSA said it would lift the suspension and instead monitor MCI for the next three years. That didn't exactly close the books on the company's government contract troubles, however. On February 9, 2004, the New Jersey Treasury Department barred the Visit Vault at www.vault.com for insider company profiles, expert advice, VAULT CAREER career message boards, expert resume reviews, the Vault Job Board and more. LIBRARY Vault Guide to the Top Telecom Employers MCI, Inc. company from winning new contracts for as long as 18 months, citing charges against former employees, including CFO Sullivan. More oversight Capellas and former SEC Chairman Richard Breeden, MCI's court-appointed monitor, are implementing new governance policies - among them, that one director a year will leave the board and one new one will be appointed. No director will stay more than 10 years. Before the bankruptcy, some directors had lingered from the first days of WorldCom's founding in 1983. In addition, all 54,000 MCI workers must complete an online ethics-training course. So far, more than 2,000 MCI managers and finance employees have gone through full-day ethics seminars. And to make sure someone is always on top of the company's morals, in October 2003 Capellas appointed a chief ethics officer who will report directly to him: Nancy Higgins, former ethics vice president at Lockheed Martin. Takeover target The bankruptcy, which wiped out about $35 billion in liabilities, leaves MCI with $3 billion in cash, more than $20 billion in annual revenue and $1.2 billion of operating income. MCI's finances and 20 million customers make the No.-2 U.S. long-distance company an alluring takeover target, according to telecom analysts. The biggest f