Every worker has to abide by the company and or government policies. People look for jobs to meet their personal needs and to fulfill organizational strategies. They have to respect the law. The paper would discuss the incidence of corruption in the workplace.
The Ethical Issue
Joan is an accountant at Creative Solutions Limited. She has worked for the company for the last ten years. Recently, the new auditors discovered some disparities in her reports (Pollock, 2012). She had made payments for the purchase of a company car twice. She had also failed to bank customers’ cash payments for six consecutive months. When the auditor confronted her with questions, she could not explain the matter. She left the auditors in her office and never showed up for work again for the whole week.
The Choices Made and Their Consequences
The company secretary sent an email to her personal mail asking her to report to work. She never responded. On the third day, the police found the body of a woman in her early forties in the neighboring town. She had committed suicide by drowning.
The auditors finalized their work and discovered so many other challenges in the record keeping. Joan had been colluding with the previous officials to steal from the company millions of dollars. She knew that she would have to face the law (Fan & Lin, 2010). The company sued the auditors for misrepresentation of reports. In her locker, she had left the names of the officials she was working with in her scheme.
Joan was a single mother with a ten-year-old boy. She did not communicate with anybody after the office incident. Her elder brother had to take the kid. The Criminal Investigations Department froze all her accounts. The company confiscated her properties. She was also paying for a mortgage.
People in her neighborhood described her as a caring woman. She even spent some of her money with the less fortunate and gave to charities. They were surprised to learn that she had been stealing from her employer. Her colleagues at work never wanted to discuss anything concerning her. Some of them had been experiencing financial problems at work and yet she could not listen to their pleas. She had stopped the company twice from increasing the staff’s salaries.
The company ordered for a lifestyle audit of all its staffs since they joined the company. Everybody in the company became a suspect. The board thought that she could not have been doing all these alone. She could have been cooperating with some individuals. The board had to fire some four top management staff (Fan & Lin, 2010). There were varied responses to the discovery of the theft.
Some people thought that the company should have put in place measures to control its funds. They should also have critically investigated any undesirable records. The neighbors and a few people thought that the company handled the situation unprofessionally. Even after the discovery of the problem, they should not have blamed the entire problem on Joan (Pollock, 2012). The process has made her child go through a difficult situation. They blamed the company for failure to manage its resources and conduct.
Conclusion
The management should take full responsibility for failure to scrutinize the records. The auditors should have discussed the matter with the board and the management. The board would then have investigated the matter and found the main perpetrators of the scheme. They would have solved the issue through internal mechanisms and legal processes.
References
Fan, C., & Lin, C. (2010). Embezzlement versus bribery. Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Pollock, J. (2012). Ethical dilemmas and decisions in criminal justice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.