As companies rush to grasp ethics, we must remember it's about more than rules
"Rules are for moral infants, principles are for moral adults," says Mark Goyder, director of the UK think tank, Tomorrow's Company. I might edit that slightly, to say rules are for moral teenagers -- like the kind of companies the Boston Globe wrote about in June, who evaded local property taxes by reincorporating in Bermuda, then insisted they'd done nothing illegal. Or a company like KPMG, which sold abusive tax shelters for years, earning $124 million in fees by depriving the federal government of $1.4 billion in revenue -- then told a 2003 Senate hearing the shelters "were consistent with the laws in place at the time." It's enough to make you roll your eyes and send them to their room.
In mid-June KPMG did admit its tax shelters were "unlawful" and said it took "full responsibility," firing the persons in question and setting up ethics programs. I wish I could say this was the action of a moral adult. But it struck me as the action of a scared teenager -- respecting not the principle of the law, but the threat of prosecution, which would mean death for an auditing firm.
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