New York ? In the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, telecommunications giant WorldCom Inc. filed for Chapter 11 protection Sunday, about a month after disclosing it had falsely inflated profits by nearly $4 billion.

The bankruptcy is the latest in a stunning series of corporate collapses stemming from deceptive accounting.

WorldCom chief executive John Sidgmore told The Associated Press Sunday that his company had negotiated approximately $2 billion in financing while it reorganizes. The company hopes to emerge from bankruptcy in 12 months.

Sidgmore said the bankruptcy should have no effect on the company’s customers from long-distance users to corporate data users.

“At the end of the day, this really will be business as usual,” he said. “We don’t think that there will be any significant impact on the employees and vendors, for that matter, and we should have plenty of cash to make it.”

Drake Johnstone, a telecom analyst with Davenport & Co. in Richmond, Va., said the banks providing the new money hope WorldCom will be able to emerge from Chapter 11 as a viable enterprise.

“My concern with that scenario is it’s unclear what other surprises WorldCom has in store,” he said. “The (internal) audit is not complete. At this point we don’t know how much revenue or cash flow the company has.”

Sidgmore said the company would look into selling some of its peripheral businesses, but not key franchises like MCI or UUNET. MCI is the company’s core long-distance business; UUNET is a major Internet player.

Despite the bankruptcy, no immediate disruptions are expected for WorldCom’s millions of MCI long-distance customers or at UUNET, which accounts for 29 percent of the capacity on the nation’s busiest Web routes.

Sidgmore said the bankruptcy won’t include the company’s international operations.

The collapse of WorldCom follows costly scandals at other big-name companies, including Adelphia Communications, Global Crossing and Enron, all of which have filed for bankruptcy as they attempt to pay creditors and reorganize their businesses.

The bankruptcy would be twice as large as Enron’s record-setting filing in December and four times as big as Global Crossing’s in January. In its filing, WorldCom reported more than $107 billion in assets but said its liabilities total more than $65 billion.

Among the creditors listed in the filing are bondholders J.P. Morgan Trust Company, which has an unsecured claim of $17.2 billion; Mellon Bank, N.A., with a claim of $6.6 billion; and CitiBank, with a claim of nearly $3.3 billion.

In Washington, spokesman David Fiske said the Federal Communications Commission was monitoring the case. He said the FCC would work to “protect consumers against any abrupt termination of service and to protect the integrity of the telecommunications network.”

Sidgmore said WorldCom is cooperating with investigators to “help them find the bad guys, punish the bad guys and leave the company alone.”

WorldCom admitted June 25 that it had falsely booked $3.85 billion in expenses to make it appear more profitable. The same day, it fired chief financial officer Scott Sullivan, who was later accused by company auditor Arthur Andersen of withholding crucial information about WorldCom’s bookkeeping.

Clinton, Miss.-based WorldCom also announced that it would lay off 17,000 workers, or 20 percent of its global work force.

Even before the hidden expenses were exposed, WorldCom was struggling. Its stock price traded as high as $64.50 in mid-1999. But shares of WorldCom and other telecommunications companies have slid ever since as the dot-com bubble burst and other market forces caused an industrywide implosion. As of Friday, a WorldCom share could be had for 9 cents.

The high-speed Internet infrastructure that telecom companies built and hyped throughout the late 1990s lost much of its value almost overnight once it became apparent there was little consumer demand for the services being offered over so-called broadband networks.

The long-distance sector, meanwhile, has been pounded by falling rates and growing competition from local Baby Bells, who have received federal permission to hone in on the market. Long-distance carriers such as WorldCom’s MCI are also losing business as customers gravitate toward e-mail and cell phones.

In March, the SEC launched a wide-ranging investigation of WorldCom that included a review of $408 million in loans made to former chief executive Bernie Ebbers. WorldCom stockholders sued the company’s board over those loans.

A month later, Ebbers resigned amid mounting questions about the loans and the financial health of the company he founded in 1983. He was replaced by Sidgmore.

SEC investigators also focused on disputed customer bills, sales commissions and the value of contracts between WorldCom and customers no longer deemed financially viable.

Major credit agencies eventually cut WorldCom’s long-term debt rating to junk status, and in June the SEC filed fraud charges against the company.

WorldCom has been in talks to raise $3 billion in financing. Last week, the company reached an agreement with creditors that prevents the company from selling any of its subsidiaries until October.

Earlier this month, a much smaller communications company, IDT Corp., announced an unsolicited $5 billion bid to buy WorldCom’s MCI long-distance business and other assets. MCI, the nation’s second largest consumer long-distance provider after AT&T Corp., was acquired by WorldCom in 1998.

WorldCom grew from a small long-distance company in Mississippi into a telecommunications force through more than 60 acquisitions over 15 years.

The expansion ceased abruptly, though, in 2000, when U.S. and European regulators blocked WorldCom’s proposed $129 billion merger with Sprint. Regulators contended that the merger would have left millions of Americans paying more for Internet and long-distance services.