Business Ethics Guide

 In Compliance, FCPA

The U.S. Government generates a substantial volume of high-quality work product. Your tax dollars are particularly hard at work in this resource from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which weighs in at 355-pages. Somehow it manages to be both wonkish and useful. Whether you’re developing a new ethics program or improving an existing one, it is critical at the outset to develop a consensus and good working definition around your primary driver(s). Towards that end, this guidebook identifies four (non-mutually exclusive) typical motivations driving ethics programs: (1) compliance-based (prevent, detect, and punish non-compliance); (2) values-based  (attract and encourage ethical excellence from good people with an aspirational corporate culture); (3) externally-based (preserve public image and stakeholder relationships); or (4) C-suite-based (insulate executives from blame for ethical failures). Regardless of the scale and scope of your project, clarity around the definition of the problem to be addressed by the ethics program is a prerequisite to setting goals and allocating resources.

us-dept-of-commerce-business-ethics-guide