When I was at the defense contractor, back in the day, the company ran afoul of the government over some ethics issues involving petty and not so petty malfeasance at the executive level. Charging various personal expenses to government contracts and actually having a department with staff (!) to administer the graft and boodle.
The company had to pay a fine (real money, it got the executives attention) and the company puffed up the board of directors with some characters of probity and virtue.
-and-
down at the 'grunt' level, the folks who actually do the work and produce the product that is sold to make the money to pay the fine, we all had to go to ethics and compliance training.
BLECH
Anyhow, it was a series of deadly dull meetings and presentations. Quite a bit of common sense stuff (which hadn't been explicitly mentioned in the employee handbook for some reason) like not destroying company or government property, doing the paperwork correctly on how work was charged to the various programs we were working on, reporting folks who were doing things that could get the company in trouble again, being careful around company reps from other companies we were working with as they were assumed to be far less ethical than we were becoming, and we didn't want to get sucked into any similar disaster their companies might be inflicting on themselves because of their lax and decrepit ethics, and being super careful around all the government inspectors crawling all over the facility trying to snag the company in another hand in the cookie jar disaster.
We didn't hear what transpired at the executive level beyond a couple of early retirements, disbanding of the graft and corruption department and some tweaks in the company charter and mission statement.
No one at the 'grunt' level ever saw an executive at a compliance training class, that's for sure. It's a safe bet they had a cushy vacation retreat in some posh resort, at company expense, and had a few lawyers wine and dine them while imbuing them with some practical advice for avoiding such fiascos in the future over desert.
The company had to pay a fine (real money, it got the executives attention) and the company puffed up the board of directors with some characters of probity and virtue.
-and-
down at the 'grunt' level, the folks who actually do the work and produce the product that is sold to make the money to pay the fine, we all had to go to ethics and compliance training.
BLECH
Anyhow, it was a series of deadly dull meetings and presentations. Quite a bit of common sense stuff (which hadn't been explicitly mentioned in the employee handbook for some reason) like not destroying company or government property, doing the paperwork correctly on how work was charged to the various programs we were working on, reporting folks who were doing things that could get the company in trouble again, being careful around company reps from other companies we were working with as they were assumed to be far less ethical than we were becoming, and we didn't want to get sucked into any similar disaster their companies might be inflicting on themselves because of their lax and decrepit ethics, and being super careful around all the government inspectors crawling all over the facility trying to snag the company in another hand in the cookie jar disaster.
We didn't hear what transpired at the executive level beyond a couple of early retirements, disbanding of the graft and corruption department and some tweaks in the company charter and mission statement.
No one at the 'grunt' level ever saw an executive at a compliance training class, that's for sure. It's a safe bet they had a cushy vacation retreat in some posh resort, at company expense, and had a few lawyers wine and dine them while imbuing them with some practical advice for avoiding such fiascos in the future over desert.
The granting of a pardon is an imputation of guilt, and the acceptance a confession of it.
