ES-3 C

Introduction

As a leader in your organization, it is vital that you are familiar with the laws that regulate your industry. Sparked by the dramatic corporate and accounting scandals of Enron, Arthur Andersen, Adelphia, and WorldCom, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was implemented in 2002 in an effort to restore confidence in the stock markets. Sarbanes-Oxley represents the most important securities legislation since the original federal securities laws of the 1930s as it increased governmental regulation and oversight of publicly traded companies and established protections for whistleblowers. The False Claims Act and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act provide a financial incentive for those who blow the whistle to report fraudulent activity within their organization.

In this task, you will select and analyze an established company’s code of ethics, analyze how an employee would raise an ethical concern within an organization, and consider current laws with respect to whistleblowers.

Scenario

You are an experienced ethics officer who has recently been hired by an established company. You have been tasked with analyzing the company’s current code of ethics and identifying areas in need of improvement.

Requirements

Your submission must represent your original work and understanding of the course material. Most performance assessment submissions are automatically scanned through the University similarity checker. Students are strongly encouraged to wait for the similarity report to generate after uploading their work and then review it to ensure the Academic Authenticity guidelines are met before submitting the file for evaluation.
 

 You must use the rubric to direct the creation of your submission because it provides detailed criteria that will be used to evaluate your work. Each requirement below may be evaluated by more than one rubric aspect. The rubric aspect titles may contain hyperlinks to relevant portions of the course.

Prepare a report (

length of 12 pages
) in which you do the following:
 

A.  Choose a company’s code of ethics from the Web Links section below and analyze that company’s code of ethics by doing the following:
 

Note: Links to the code of ethics for the companies can be found in the Web Links section. The code of ethics is only used for section A. You must choose a code of ethics from one of the following companies:

•  BP

•  Comcast

•  Deloitte

•  Tenet

•  Mayo Clinic

•  Oracle

•  PepsiCo

•  Target

•  Walmart

•  Wells Fargo
 

1.  Analyze how well the chosen company’s code of ethics covers the topic of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

2.  Analyze how well the chosen company’s code of ethics covers the topic of compliance with legal mandates.

a.  Describe the ramifications for an organization when it is noncompliant with legal mandates.

b.  Describe 
two policies the chosen company has in their code of ethics to ensure employees behave legally and/or ethically.

3.  Analyze how well the chosen company’s code of ethics facilitates the development of an ethical culture.

4.  Identify 
three resources available to employees to use when raising an ethical concern and discuss which resource you would most likely use to report an ethical concern.
 

B.  Discuss 
three factors an employee might consider before deciding to report unethical conduct observed at work.

1.  Describe 
three internal steps (i.e., inside the company) an employee could take if they decide to report or blow the whistle on misconduct or unethical behavior in the workplace.

2.  Describe 
two possible external actions (i.e., outside the company) an employee can take to report or blow the whistle on misconduct or unethical behavior in the workplace.
 

C.  Analyze 
one advantage and 
one disadvantage of paying whistleblowers. Base your analysis on 
one of the following laws:

•  False Claims Act

•  Dodd-Frank Wall Street and Consumer Protection Act
 

D.  Analyze the changes that organizations have made based on the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines.

1.  Discuss 
three culpability factors that are used to determine fines under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines.
 

E.  Acknowledge sources, using in-text citations and references, for content that is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized.
 

F.  Demonstrate professional communication in the content and presentation of your submission.