Apparently Ethics Laws Are Only for "The Little People"

[Minimalist]

[downbeatplumb]

[Jackie]

[Minimalist]

[vorlon13]

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 Grand Nudger]

For the most part, that doesn't happen in a cushy place, or a fancy resort, it happens at 1030 am in a nondescript meeting room with tapioca walls and motivational posters interspersed with third rate corporate culture "art"; where everyone is bored out of their mind and nursing a hangover from partying at the company bar across the street the night before, huh? 

The plebs are out on the floor making widgets, middle management is being lectured, and the higher ups are washing their hands. People get the axe for getting -caught- at grift, not for the grift..but because they were demonstrably incompetent at their job of grifting. That's the corporate sense of accountability, for ya, eh?

(sounds like you haven't always been a dirt farmer, lol? Me either - I used to lend my security clearance to manufacturers before I went Office Space on 'em)

[Thumpalumpacus]

Even as a lowly E-2, I had to complete an ethics statement documenting any personal connection I might have with both superiors and contractors, as well as tax info etc.

[Jackalope]

Even as a lowly E-2, I had to complete an ethics statement docementing any personal connection I might have with both superiors and contractors, as well as tax info etc.

This, and I guarantee that any classified information I had access to was far, far less interesting than what a White House staffer has, much less the president.

We received lectures on ethics on a regular basis, particularly but not exclusively as applied to security (i.e. if one does something unethical that one could get blackmailed for should the wrong people find out about it, one becomes an lucrative target for foreign intelligence agents).

Such things are for the little people, obv.