Do TruthTellers enable Regulators?

SIPA says that whistleblowers or TruthTellers might be more effective than the regulators. The Telegraph in the U.K. published an article that relates how a TruthTeller alerted Eliot Spitzer to the widespread wrongdoing in the mutual fund industry. Some excerpts from that article follow:

Wall Street's whistle-blower Noreen Harrington exposed widespread corruption in America's mutual funds. In her first UK interview, she tells Abigail Hofman why she made her fateful call to the New York state attorney-general. Noreen Harrington is the woman you were never meant to know about. Eliot Spitzer, the New York state attorney general, said he would take her name to his grave.
It was Harrington's anonymous call to the attorney general's office last May, which led to the unveiling of widespread corruption at the heart of the US mutual fund industry. In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Harrington explains how she discovered the wrongdoing and why she made that call. Spitzer has praised the 47-year-old Harrington on prime time American television as "a spectacular individual who did an amazing job for all investors in this nation". Spitzer and his colleagues took Harrington's tip-off seriously because of her background: she had 20 years' experience in the financial industry, including an 11-year stint at the leading investment bank Goldman Sachs (where she achieved managing director status) and had worked both on Wall Street and in London (initially for Goldman and then for Barclays Capital). She started asking questions because she believes "that's your responsibility as a senior person in the business".
Harrington talks about "one crowning moment" that pushed her over the edge - when she was asked to review her elder sister's evaporating 401(k) pension pot. Most pension monies are invested in mutual funds.
"My sister is one of the hardest workers I know," Harrington says. "Suddenly I saw her as a victim of this crime. Up until then, I hadn't really thought about the human toll: all those Americans whose only liquid asset is their 401(k). And after I looked at it from the bottom up, then I couldn't sleep at night. I knew I had to call somebody." And that's what she did.
In May 2003, Harrington contacted Spitzer's office. Initially, she just left an anonymous voice-mail. Then, realizing that her original message had been too vague, she called again and spoke to an executive who persuaded her to go into the office for several meetings. "The basis for that was they would investigate and no-one would ever know who I was," she says. She told none of her friends or family about her dealings with the attorney general's office. "I truly hoped my name would never come out. And so the right number of people to tell in those circumstances is zero."

SIPA recognizes Noreen Harrington for her courage as a TruthTeller.