Is anyone watching? (and other ethical questions)

You give the cashier at the grocery store a $10 bill, and you get back change for a $20 bill. What do you do? Your response has nothing to do with your professional ethics. Or does it?

As public purchasing professionals, ethical thinking and practice influence our lives at both personal and professional levels. But because "ethics" or "ethical thinking and practice" are so entwined into who we are and what we do, it is often difficult to separate the personal from the professional. In fact, mastering personal ethics enables professional ethics to become much more natural. Therefore, we need to focus on who we are and how we think and act.

All around us are stories relating to ethical behavior, and sometimes the outcomes are not favorable. Standards are defined to establish and direct ethical behavior in many areas of our lives. Speed limits, stop signs, yield signs and licensing are all designed to direct safe, ethical driving; there are consequences if you cross those lines. Doctors subscribe to a very strict ethical code including the Hippocratic Oath. Auditors and accountants have a code of ethics. Corporate "misbehaving" led Congress to pass the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to require acceptable, ethical corporate behavior. Everywhere you look is evidence of attempts to establish ethical levels.

Ethical expectations also pervade every area of our professional lives. The National Institute of Governmental Purchasing (NIGP), the Institute of Supply Management and other state and local entities provide a strict code of ethics. For public purchasers, state or municipal codes grant us specific direction and authority to conduct the responsibilities of our positions ethically, fairly and impartially. These statutes, codes and rules provide clearly defined direction on ethical behavior. However, it is in the "gray areas," where clarity may be lacking, that we are challenged to make correct ethical decisions. The gray edges of ethical conduct are often misunderstood, and this article will highlight some common misconceptions - and hopefully help to highlight the ethical path.

MISCONCEPTION 1: "I can't make a difference."

If you think you cannot make a difference, you may be right. However, by refusing to accept that premise and insisting on high ethical practices, you can realize a positive, ethically sound outcome. The United States Army, in its most recent advertising campaign, calls itself "An Army of One," recognizing that each soldier can make a difference.

Here's an example of how one person can make a difference: A purchasing professional from the local area served on the advisory committee for the business management program of one of our local colleges, with the responsibility to evaluate the program curriculum. Discovering that students were graduating from the program without any ethics training, the purchasing professional recommended that an ethics class become a requirement for graduation. He gathered data and shared it with other committee members and the chair of the program, and the ethics class became a requirement. This same purchasing professional was working with a set of agency purchasing rules that were silent on the subject of ethics. To ensure that the agency followed ethical purchasing practices, he was instrumental in seeing that new administrative rules were written, reviewed in public hearings and implemented into the agency's purchasing practices. One individual can indeed make a difference.

MISCONCEPTION 2: "No one is watching."

"Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking," says author H. Jackson Brown, Jr. There was an accounting clerk for a small city in the Northwest who apparently figured that no one was watching her - and she failed her character test. This 18-year employee of the city worked in the finance department with five other employees, and her responsibilities included canceling city-owned credit cards for former employees. Because of staff cutbacks, a review of credit card cancellations by another person had been eliminated. Police investigators later found at least four cards that were not canceled, but were retained and used by the clerk. This activity was discovered after a bank employee questioned the use of the city's credit card to pay a utility bill on a private residence. Independent auditors revealed misuse of the credit cards totaled $108,000. Result: three years, two months in jail. But that's not the end of the story. The recently promoted finance director of the same city was discovered writing checks to a bogus company. She was cashing the checks and depositing them into her own account. The additional step of her work being reviewed by the city manager had been eliminated. Independent auditors, brought in to clean up after the finance director resigned, discovered a trail of bogus checks totaling more than $1.4 million, resulting in a long jail term. City officials have implemented procedures to require two levels of review by different staff members. Someone should always be watching.

MISCONCEPTION 3: "If I didn't know it was wrong, it must be OK."

Often in our day-to-day work activities, we encounter others who unknowingly take actions to violate the rules within which we operate. Our internal customers usually rely on the central purchasing staff to keep them within the ethically acceptable boundaries or explain what those boundaries are. When customers are unaware of or attempt to elude the central purchasing authority, problems can occur. Here is an example: A large centralized purchasing agency had delegated certain informal purchasing levels to their offices scattered throughout the city and state. The agency also had established several agency-wide, mandatory-use contracts for commonly used products and services. A new employee wanting to make her mark on the agency negotiated a services contract with a provider near her office. Proud of her accomplishment, she sent an agency-wide email extolling the value of the newly established contract. When the purchasing manager saw the email, the new employee was advised to cancel the negotiated contract immediately because it violated the terms of an existing mandated contract. It also had terms unfavorable to the agency. It took considerable discussion between the new employee and the purchasing manager, and several references to the purchasing code, to make the new employee understand the risk to the agency and her personal risk for potentially violating the purchasing code. When the supplier of the new contract realized that the person who had negotiated the contract did not have authority for such action, they reluctantly canceled the contract. Ignorance is not an excuse.