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This kind of stuff makes me mad. I was taught about robber barons in school (or actually I think by my uncle but…). And what I was taught was that business used to be seen as an amoral area. But then society agreed (or rather it no longer was an accepted excuse to claim business was an amoral area) that morality applied to whatever you did, whether you were at work, or not.
But we keep getting these continuing examples that are so distressing: Enron, Worldom, Tyco, Accenture, HP… It is so disappointing that such behavior is mainly excused (until finally the evidence presented is so damning that most stop defending the specific case in question).
Yet so much of what is unethical is barely questioned. If we don’t question things that are this bad, then those who insist on being as devious as they can without being called on it will just practice worse and worse behavior. We have to do a much better job of not tolerating such unethical behavior.
How Merck saved $1.5B paying itself for drug patents
The convoluted arrangement gave Merck a sizable tax reduction for roughly a decade. On MSD’s internal books — and only there — a portion of the incoming royalty payments were allocated as taxable income to Abbey. That reduced Merck’s tax liability.
GAO concludes Accenture, others, use tax havens:
One of the four, Accenture Ltd. of Hamilton, Bermuda, is ranked No. 24 on Washington Technology’s 2002 list of Top 100 federal IT prime contractors. The company had $279 million in federal contracts in fiscal 2001, according to the GAO report. Overall, the four companies pulled in $2.7 billion in government contracts during 2001.
Accenture Tax Dodging The Bullet
Tax Loopholes Follow Letter, Not Intent, Of Laws
Why do we not condemn the behavior of those that do these things? I think it is much easier to do the right thing when you get a huge paycheck but we seem to act as though the lawyers and executives that take these actions don’t have the ability to do the right thing. They are just doing what everyone else is doing. I don’t think acting illegally, immorally, unethically is excusable just because lots of other people are. It’s reminds me of little kids that don’t realise that just because their friend did something wrong doesn’t mean they get a pass to do so also. For little kids that seems to be a common phase but why do we accept such behavior in professionals?
I know this behavior is always going to exist. What frustrates me is how bad the behavior is. It is not that people are pushing against what is acceptable (That is what will happen). It is sad how bad the behavior is that is considered acceptable.
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October 2nd, 2006 at 5:52 pm
You hit the nail on the head when you said your uncle (or school) taught you that “But then society agreed … that morality applied to whatever you did, whether you were at work, or not.” The results we are seeing today are coming from what, 20 years of ‘business ethics’ being taught.
Morality demands more than “letter of the law” mentality, whereas you can be ethical by following the letter of the law. Outside of academic institutions that are supported by religious organizations, I would be surprised if morality is taught anymore.
October 26th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
[...] If fraud increased the costs for advertisers, Google would get a portion of that money. So I can see why people could look at this and say Google benefits from web click fraud. But this is only true in a very limited view. Google already has the advertiser committing to run ads. They will keep that advertiser paying them money as long as the advertiser is making money. It is in Google’s interest for the advertiser to make money so they will increase the amount of money they pay Google. It is true some poorly run companies focused on short term gains and without ethics (there sure are plenty of such example) would kill their long term viability for a boost to earnings today that fraudulent clicks would provide (not that the company would encourage it, but they would fail to take vigorous action to prevent long term damage to their business to try and gain huge bonuses… by short term effect of not preventing click fraud). [...]