Fear and Silence
Jennings puts it very well, she says,
"No one wakes up one day and decides, “You know what would be good? A gigantic fraud! I think I’ll perpetuate a myth through accounting fraud and make money that way.” Nor does anyone suddenly wake up and exclaim, “Forgery! Forging bank documents to show lots of assets. There’s the key to business success.”

These icons of ethical collapse did not descend into the depths of misdeeds overnight. Nor did they descend alone. To be able to forge bank documents, one needs a fairly large staff and a great many averted eyes. To drain the corporate treasury for personal use requires many pacts of silence among staff and even board members.”


It often starts, in our experience, with meeting the numbers. Surely, we reason, adding one extra name to the database won't hurt. After all, that little Jameson boy was registered, and his parents did want him to go to our program. He would have gone, too, if they hadn't moved away .... and we start to rationalize it.

On the Spirit Lake Forum on Ethical Questions Willie Davis, from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, has this to say about ethics,
"Guilt seems to be an underlying condition for those of us who have ethics. I feel as if I have done something wrong when I have conducted myself dishonestly."

Nothing you can do? As we will discuss in the next section, by-standers can be crucial. Dr. De Mars, on the same forum, had this to add,
Willie is right about the value of guilt....I still remember a situation years ago when a project director wanted to count everyone that their facility served, even though their program had specific criteria for who was eligible, and a lot of people getting services didn't meet those criteria. ...I ALMOST went along with it. Like all of the things we discuss in our ethics course, there was just about every argument we discuss in that course right down the line. "We all need to get along." No sense arguing with the project director. "We need to meet the numbers." We really did need to show a certain number of people receiving services.... and so on.

Shortly before time to leave, I was almost the last one in the building, an employee came into my office and asked to speak with me. She said quietly, "I don't think that is right, what you and the director talked about in the meeting today. Maybe if we had to face up to the fact that we weren't serving all of the people we are supposed to we would go out and recruit the types of individuals this program was set up to help. I think we could do it instead of taking the easy way out."

Like Willie, I felt ashamed of myself that I had been willing to "go along". ... Even though people are often afraid to speak up, there was no really bad outcome. I told the director we had to report the data exactly as it was. The director shrugged and went along with it and I never told anyone about the conversation I had had the night before.

So, although it is possible that an individual who has the courage to speak up will lose her job, it is also possible that she will make a change and have no negative effects whatsoever. What prevents people from speaking up, then?

Fear.

Employees may see an issue, but do not report it for fear of retribution.