Ethics & Culture

You wake in the night, only to toss and turn for what seems like an eternity. When you’re not thinking about how tired you’re going to be in the morning, you are mulling over work concerns. You’re not worried about unfinished business, but the “what ifs” keep running through your mind. “What if our new […]

Post-Enron, scrutiny of the ethics of Corporate America remains a high priority for investors and regulators. Companies have responded by beefing up their ethics and compliance departments, with many creating chief ethics or chief compliance officer posts and devoting considerable resources to those functions. But after they’ve put their programs in place, how do companies […]

The staff meeting ran long, but you decide to revisit the main points one last time anyway. “I cannot over-emphasize the importance of what we’ve been talking about today,” you say to the group. “The values you see on this Code of Conduct are more than just nice words; these principles guide all our activities […]

California has earthquakes. Kansas has tornados. Louisiana has hurricanes. Here in Boston, we have $14.6 billion taxpayer funded highway tunnels. And all of them kill. The night before this column was written, a couple from Boston was driving through an extension of the heavily traveled Massachusetts Turnpike, on their way to Logan International Airport to […]

It is a corporate ethics dilemma made in New York City tabloid heaven. Take one Brazilian native arrested on charges of prostitution, narcotics and money laundering. Accuse her of running a brothel out of her Manhattan apartment. Let the gossip columns have a field day, printing salacious details of the “sugar daddies” providing her gifts […]

Benchmarking compliance efforts among companies has been one of the more prized, if elusive, ideas in corporate governance circles in the last several years. Now one professional association has shed some light on the subject. The nonprofit Open Compliance & Ethics Group has released key findings of its 2005 Benchmarking Study, based on responses from […]

The New York Stock Exchange and the NASD may have unveiled extensive guidance last week to clarify their rules on gift-giving and entertainment between company and client, but their advice really boils down to three words: use your head. Answering a question that has vexed compliance officers and bar-hopping traders alike, the two trading exchanges […]

In the latest of our weekly Q&As with governance and compliance executives, we talk to Marjorie Doyle, chief ethics & compliance officer at $27.3 billion DuPont Corp. An index of previous conversations is available here. Describe your duties. I oversee a relatively new organization within the company called “Ethics and Compliance Central” … a group […]