Last month I spoke to the Accounting Scholars Program in the G. Brint Ryan College of Business at the University of North Texas, where I had spoken three years earlier.
This program prepares UNT’s highest-achieving scholars for a successful professional career in accounting, and they are a very sharp group of students!
We discussed the absolute importance of ethical behavior as I told them my true-life story about how the lack of ethics in Citigroup and the other large banks led to the massive frauds that caused the financial crisis and the resulting financial ruin it caused millions of people. I emphasized that a large part of the financial crisis could have been prevented if the banks had followed their own published ethics policies and listened to those few employees who tried to warn of the malfeasance and what they saw as blatant ethics violations.
We also discussed details of the many government cover-ups of the banking misdeeds that I encountered in attempting to hold the bank and executives accountable for the fraud. And we talked about the broader perspective of government corruption, with my noting that the highly respected annual study of government corruption in 180 countries worldwide by Transparency International, the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), shows that the United States over the years has consistently dropped in its rankings of the least corrupt countries in the world, with our country now ranked #28, and tied with the Bahamas, for the overall amount of government corruption.
We discussed the importance of speaking up if an employee sees something questionable, or makes them uncomfortable. Doing so gives the company an opportunity to have a dialogue with the employee. But if the employee is uncomfortable with a situation and chooses not to speak up, then the employee should seriously consider quietly looking for another job. Silence rarely stops unethical behavior. And we discussed a true example of an employee who witnessed something that made her very uncomfortable and chose not to say anything and stayed with the company, and the dire circumstances she experienced.
In the follow-up Q&A session, the students fully recognized the need for ethical behavior and decision-making and the absolute importance of being true to themselves in their careers. This recognition, truly, is the only way our country can reverse the continued ethical decline.
One of the students noted in their formal written feedback on my talk, which Professor Madhuri Bandla, the director of the Accounting Scholars Program, forwarded to me, “I was encouraged to expressly and thoroughly speak the truth no matter what. While speaking the truth may go against the entity on a business level, it upholds the moral principle of integrity, which is much more valuable.”
Richard Bowen is widely known as the Citigroup whistleblower. As Business Chief Underwriter for Citigroup during the housing bubble financial crisis meltdown, he repeatedly warned Citi executive management and the board about fraudulent behavior within the organization. The company certified poor mortgages as quality mortgages and sold them to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other investors.
