Business Ethics Dr. Aravind Banakar –

Business Ethics CASE STUDY (20 Marks) There’s a new deputy sheriff in town and her name is Sally Quillian Yates, deputy attorney general of the United States. In September, she announced significant Department of Justice policy shifts in the prosecution of corporate wrongdoing. Monday her memo was clarified, making it even clearer that the DOJ wants companies to cooperate and do so in a timely way. The changes, six of them listed below, are a sea change in leadership direction at the DOJ. The thrust of the changes moves from seeking the most amount of money from corporate coffers to insuring that individuals are held accountable for crimes they commit on the corporate watch.

Is this a big deal? You bet. These new guidelines will likely change how executives and boards and ethics and compliance functions divvy up internal investigations to protect interests that have been separated with these changes. No longer are the employee accused and the company where that employee works going to find mutual benefit in a shared defense. Remember “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” the economic game theory you learned in college that introduced the concept of win-win in negotiating. The game proves that people do not always act rationally and sometimes can achieve a better outcome by cooperating than pursuing just their self-interest. It uses captured criminals in separate interrogation rooms to demonstrate these effects. Each would get the best outcome for himself if he turned in his fellow criminal but if they both act in their own self-interest, their punishment is even greater.

In other words, it was a win-win for them to collaborate and seek a solution that worked for both of them even though an initial analysis might have led them to believe that not collaborating, or cooperating, with one another would serve their personal interests more. In a beautiful, ironic twist, Yates is deploying the prisoner’s dilemma to turn up the heat on white-collar criminals. Yes, the notion of two people choosing not to be truthful is a paradoxical choice to use in discussing how these policy shifts will change the dynamics in corporate corruption investigations. Yates has introduced six key changes, outlined here, that effectively drive a wedge between employee and employer when it comes to doing wrong in the name of a corporation. Now, internal corporate compliance officers must share internal information implicating employees who acted badly—or their supervisors—or risk steeper fines or other penalties.

Answer the following question. Q1. Give an overview of the case. Q2. How it is possible to separate ethics from compliance in corporate life.Debate.

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