2006 Nj Ethics Report

The HR-Ethics Alliance

The early- to mid-2000s was a boom time for gross corporate misconduct. Between 2005 and 2006 alone, Jeffrey Skilling, president of Enron; Dennis Kozlowski, Tyco International CEO; and Bernard Ebbers, co-founder and chief executive at WorldCom, were convicted of charges ranging from conspiracy and insider trading to securities fraud and receipt of unauthorized bonuses.

The aforementioned executives -- and many more -- paid a steep price for their misdeeds, but not before irreparable harm had been done to the organizations they were charged with leading, not to mention the damage done to thousands of their employees' and customers' lives.

Now, as the decade since that misconduct boom time draws to a close, the conversation around corporate ethics is once again centered on those whose moral compasses have led them astray.

There's been Bernie Madoff, the stock broker and investment adviser who pleaded guilty in March 2009 to operating the largest Ponzi scheme in history. And Tony Hayward, the onetime CEO of BP, whose response to the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil-rig explosion landed him in front of Congress and ultimately led to his stepping down as head of the oil and energy giant.

These examples aside, or perhaps because of the fallout from such public displays of ethically questionable conduct, it seems more companies are making corporate ethics a priority again within their organizations.

In fact, recent figures indicate that many organizations are creating executive positions to focus exclusively on ethics compliance. A recent Society for Human Resource Management survey of 400 HR professionals found that nearly half (48 percent) of the organizations polled reported that they now employ an ethics officer.

Theoretically, companies have no more or less responsibility to act ethically than in the past. But, in 2011, employees, shareholders and the general public demand increased transparency and accountability from corporate leaders, and recent events have only underscored the importance of this.

"Recent decisions by corporations to hide dangers to consumers as a result of flawed manufacturing processes, the taking of short-cuts on safety procedures, or assuming wildly inappropriate financial risks have resulted in loud voices pushing for stronger regulations and/or safeguards," says Steve Miranda, chief human resource and content integration officer for Alexandria, Va.-based SHRM.

Mortgage fraud scheme discovered at Paragon- New Jersey ...

Riveron and Cardoza would hire Peter Lamicella of Lighthouse Appraisals, LLC, located in Toms River, to prepare the appraisal report for the property, the prosecutor's office said. They would instruct Lamicella to provide an appraisal report directly to Paragon with property values provided by Woolbert so they appeared to meet Paragon's loan amount to property value ratio.

Ethics and Integrity in Public Administration, Concepts and Cases

The Journal of clinical ethics

Practical decision making in health care ethics, cases and concepts

Encyclopedia of business ethics and society

The Ethics of Emerging Media, Information, Social Norms, and New Media Technology