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Volume 4 Number 2 January
20, 2006 |
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Undoing wrongdoing Due diligence beats locking the barn after the horse
is gone Many years ago, in another life, I was doing case work in the projects of a large inner city. One evening, I was checking in on a young single mother, and, in the course of the visit, she asked me whether I wanted to see her "babies." Of course I did. They were the most important things in her life, so it was just polite. More important, it would give me an opportunity to see how they were doing and whether other agencies needed to be involved. We went to the bedroom and she snapped on the light. The room was sparse. There were walls that had once been white, a glaring un-shaded light bulb, and in the middle of the floor a well-worn mattress on which two little girls slept, curled around a large jagged hole in the center of the mattress. That was all there was in the room -- unless you counted the thousands of cockroaches that covered every available surface. They were on the floor, the walls, the ceilings, the mattress, and the little girls. It was the type of scene that etches itself into your brain and makes you itch every time you think about it. But that tableau lasted only a short time. As soon as the light went on, the roaches began to move and within seconds they had vacated the room, skittering into cracks and crevices. Many of them, however, opted for the route over the mattress and the little girls, and disappeared into the hole in the center of the mattress. I've thought of that scene recently as I've read about the individuals and organizations who are skittering around trying to distance themselves from Jack Abramoff, the kingpin in a corporate-Congressional ethics scandal of epic proportions. After Abramoff pleaded guilty, those who have benefited from his ill-gotten gains have been falling all over themselves in an effort of give back the tainted money. -- with about as much success as Judas trying to return the 30 pieces of silver. Some have given the money back to Abramoff. Others have resorted to donating the money to charity. The latter ploy, while on the surface admirable, raises an interesting question. Is it ethical for charities to benefit from the wrongdoing of benefactors or others? I won't discuss that, but it's worth thinking about. What I want to focus on is the ethical worth of returning money once the corruption has been discovered. While it seems like the right thing to do, it seems that it carries no particular ethical merit. You would be a worse person for not returning it, but you're not necessarily a better person -- or organization -- for doing so. Nor does returning the money -- or donating to charity, for that matter -- remove the ethical stain you incurred when accepting the money in the first place. Like poor Lady Macbeth, the stain remains no matter how often you try to wash your hands. There are two possible defenses for those who find themselves tainted by this widespread scandal. The first is that the person or organization simply didn't know that the money and the person they received it from were involved in questionable activities. That is merely a dodge, and not a very effective one. Jack Abramoff's shady dealings were well known to anyone who was paying attention. I was aware of him years ago, as were many people of my acquaintance. Perhaps you didn't know what he was up to until he hit the news columns recently, but had you been doing business with him, you should have made it your business to find out before taking large sums of cash from him. It's something that comes under the heading of due diligence. I learned the lesson many, many years ago, when my friend and classmate Dave wanted something that I had. He offered to trade me something very desirable for it, and I took the bait. It was so long ago that I can remember the lesson, but not the actual objects involved. I think we were about eight. When I came home with my new acquisition, my father wanted to know where I got it. "From Dave." Where did Dave get it? "I don't know." So, my father made it his business to find out -- by calling Dave's father. It turns out that Dave had acquired the item by less than savory means, and I had to return it so it could go to its rightful owner. Meanwhile, Dave had traded my object away for something already consumed, and I was out of luck. I learned then that if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I learned to check out the provenance of anything that was offered. And I learned to be wary of dealing with Dave. The other old chestnut that will be trotted out is that a person is "innocent until proven guilty," which is wrongly supposed to apply to the court of public opinion. All "innocent until proven guilty" deals with are the rules of evidence in a court of law. It places the burden of proof on the prosecution. It doesn't mean that, absent an actual conviction, I can't consider a person's reputation in my personal dealings with him. Michael Jackson has been accused of terrible things. No prosecutor has convinced a jury of those things beyond the shadow of a doubt. So, before the law, Michael Jackson is innocent. That is as it should be. However, were I the guardian of a young boy, there is no way on earth that he would be permitted to do a sleepover at Neverland -- or anywhere else where Michael Jackson is present. That is not a violation of "innocent until proven guilty." It's merely prudence and due diligence. So, the message for us in all of this is to be aware of who it is we're doing business with and to preclude an indelible ethical stain by doing due diligence, because all the hand-washing in the world can't remove the blot that comes from dealing with people known to be unethical. I'm not a big fan of those little sermonette signs outside churches, the ones with the catchy little slogans. For me they are a combination of superficial religious sentiment and really bad puns. But as I was pondering this column, I came across one which seems to have hit the nail on the head: "Don't do anything that would you try to undo, if you were caught." It's not an unassailable statement, but it's a great rule of thumb. Had the people who gladly took sums of money -- some of them quite large -- from Jack Abramoff followed that advice, they might have survived with their integrity intact. Instead, they failed in due diligence and they -- and their organizations -- have been caught up in the web of the scandal. |
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© Copyright 2006 Carlton Vogt |