Ethics Auditing Essay Example

Ethics Auditing Essay Example Ethics Auditing Paper Ethics Auditing Paper Ethics Auditing: Identify the benefits and limits of ethics auditing. Is there a strategic role that ethics auditing may play in a company? Ethics Auditing By definition, an ethics audit is a â€Å"systematic evaluation of an organization’s ethics program and/or performance to determine its effectiveness. † (1) This concept of ethics auditing is fairly new and few companies have conducted an ethics audit. However, performing such audits will likely become more mainstream as recent legislation encourages greater ethical accountability for companies to demonstrate they are abiding by the law and have established programs to improve their ethical decision making. The U. S. Sentencing Commission (the â€Å"Commission) has amended the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations (â€Å"FSGO†) whereby an effective compliance and ethics program must â€Å"exercise due diligence to prevent, detect, and report criminal conduct and otherwise promote an organizational culture that encourages ethical conduct and a commitment to compliance with all applicable law. (2) The Commission noted there are seven minimum requirements of an effective ethics program: (1) Standards and procedures to prevent and detect criminal conduct; (2) Responsibility at all levels of the program, together with adequate program resources and authority for its managers; (3) Due diligence in hiring and assigning personnel to positions with substantial authority; (4) Communicating standards and procedures, including a specific requirement for training at all levels; (5) Monitoring, auditing, and non-retaliatory internal guidance/reporting systems, including periodic evaluation of program effectiveness; (6) Promotion and enforcement of compliance and ethical conduct; and (7) Taking reasonable steps to respond appropriately and prevent further misconduct upon detecting a violation. These requirements should be addressed through the ethics audit. Framework for an Ethics Audit In addition to the requirements noted by the Commission, there are many different questions that can be addressed by an ethics audit. How broad should the audit be? How often should the audit be performed? How will the company communicate the results with its constituencies? As each company has unique needs, each ethics audit should be unique. An example of a framework for an ethics audit is detailed below(4). Companies can adapt this framework to their own needs and circumstances. Step 1: Secure Commitment of Top Managers and Board of Directors As noted in the class slides, â€Å"a corporation only acts through those who act for it and it is the latter who must assume responsibility for the corporation. † (3) Essentially, management and the board of directors are responsible for the direction of a corporation. If there is no commitment from the top levels of a corporation, it is very unlikely that an audit would be successful. Step 2: Establish a Committee to Oversee the Ethics Audit The committee should consist of members who are knowledgeable about ethics auditing and come from various departments. In most cases, companies may not have internal employees that have the skill set to serve on an ethics audit committee. In such circumstances, external consultants, such as the Ethics Resource Center, can be used to assist with the audit. Step 3: Define the Scope of the Audit Process As mentioned above, each organization is unique and therefore, the scope of an ethics audit will differ from company to company. The committee should establish a scope based on the company’s risks and how those risks will be addressed. The committee should then monitor the progress of the audit based on the scope defined. Step 4: Review Organizational Mission, Values, Goals and Policies and Define Ethical Priorities In this step, the committee should examine and review all of the company’s policies, procedures and practices related to any areas defined in the scope of the audit process. All of these items may or may not be stated in the company’s mission statement. In some cases, the committee may find areas where policies need to be established and procedures updated. An effective ethics audit should review all these areas and assess their strengths and weaknesses. Step 5: Collect and Analyze Relevant Information This step is the where the majority of the audit work will take place. The committee should review internal and external documents and more importantly, gather employee, customer and stakeholder feedback through surveys. As employees are the key to carrying out an effective ethics program and to successful business operations, gathering and understanding their feedback is crucial. Customer and stakeholder perception of the company is also critical, so collecting their thoughts and opinions will help to create and maintain customer satisfaction and uphold stakeholder expectations. Step 6: Verify the Results The results collected in Step 5 should then be verified by an independent source. The independent assessment will verify the quality, accuracy and completeness of the audit. Having a third party verify this information will also offer an extra layer of assurance to external constituents. Step 7: Report the Findings The final step of the process is to report the findings to management and the board of directors through an ethics audit report. The report should outline all six steps discussed above and identify what the committee discovered throughout the process. In some cases, the findings may be more meaningful if combined with some benchmarking of similar companies in the industry. Such benchmarking is available through the OCEG Benchmarking Study that discusses best practices across industries. Benefits of Ethics Audits There are many reasons companies go through the process detailed above and perform an ethics audit. In some cases, management may simply want to comply with the FSGO or the board of directors may encourage compliance with these guidelines. From a business perspective, the auditing process can highlight trends, improve organizational learning and facilitate communication and working relationships (5). Internally, companies are able to assess their current policies and possibly find ways to increase efficiency in its operations. Additionally, the buzz word in the business world today is â€Å"transparency†. An ethics audit is one way to provide employees, customers and stakeholders with greater transparency. Many constituents have become wary of verbal assurances from companies. An ethics audit is verified by a third party and thus, seems to carry more weight than internal communication from management. Limits of Ethics Audits While the benefits of performing an ethics audit may be many, there are also some limitations. Many people interchange the words â€Å"ethics† and â€Å"integrity†. How do you measure the integrity or ethics of an organization? It is certainly not as easy to measure integrity as it is to measure financial performance. Financial performance can be quantified while integrity and ethics are the subjective aspects of a company’s culture. Models such as Six Sigma, the Balanced Scorecard and the Triple Bottom Line have been developed to capture structural and behavioral organizational ethical performance (6). However, these models likely will involve external consultants, which can prove to be costly to an organization. Additionally, ethics audits could uncover an issue that, when reported, could hurt employee, customer or stakeholder relations. This could also lead to public scrutiny. Strategic Role of Ethics Auditing Ethics auditing can be an important piece of the strategic direction of a company. The ethics audit can prove to be a useful management tool in helping a company to identify important initiatives and improvements. By identifying such initiatives, companies can prioritize its resources to focus on such ideas. The ethics audit can also help companies to fulfill their mission statements and identify areas where improvement of operating practices may be needed. In summary, and perhaps most importantly, the auditing process can demonstrate the positive impact of ethical conduct and convince constituents of the value of adapting more ethical and socially responsible business practices (7). Reference Page Cited Materials: (1) Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making and Cases, Ferrell, Fraedrich, Ferrell, Eighth Edition, p. 243 (2) Ethics Resource Center, FSGO, Part 2 Article: thics. org/resource/fsgo-series-part-2 (3) Corporate Governance Social Responsibility Class Slides, 9/26/2011 (4) Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making and Cases, Ferrell, Fraedrich, Ferrell, Eighth Edition, p. 252 (5) Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making and Cases, Ferrell, Fraedrich, Ferrell, Eighth Edition, p. 245 (6) Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making and Cases, Ferrell, Fraedrich, Ferrell, Eighth Edition, p. 248 (7) Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making and Cases, Ferrell, Fraedrich, Ferrell, Eighth Edition, p. 265

Amputations During the Civil War

Amputations During the Civil War Amputations became widespread during the Civil War  and the removal of a limb was the most common surgical procedure in battlefield hospitals. Its often assumed that amputations were performed so often  because surgeons at the time were unskilled and simply resorted to procedures bordering on butchery. Yet most Civil War surgeons were fairly well-trained, and the medical books of the era detail precisely how amputations could be performed and when it was appropriate. So its not as if the surgeons were removing limbs out of ignorance. Surgeons had to resort to such a drastic measure because a new type of bullet came into widespread use in the war. In many cases, the only way to try to save a wounded soldiers life was to amputate a shattered limb. The poet Walt Whitman, who had been working as a journalist in New York City, traveled from his home in Brooklyn to the battlefront in Virginia in December 1862, following the Battle of Fredericksburg. He was shocked by a gruesome sight he recorded in his diary: â€Å"Spent a good part of the day in a large brick mansion on the banks of the Rappahannock, used as a hospital since the battle – seems to have received only the worst cases. Outdoors, at the foot of a tree, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, c., a full load for a one-horse cart.† What Whitman saw in Virginia was a common sight at Civil War hospitals. If a soldier had been struck in the arm or leg, the bullet tended to shatter the bone, creating horrendous wounds. The wounds were certain to become infected, and often the only way to save the patients life was to amputate the limb. Destructive New Technology: The Minià © Ball In the 1840s an officer in the French Army, Claude-Etienne Minià ©, invented a new bullet. It was different than the traditional round musket ball as it had a conical shape. Minià ©Ã¢â‚¬â„¢s new bullet had a hollow base at the bottom, which would be forced to expand by gases released by the igniting gunpowder when the rifle was fired. While expanding, the lead bullet fit snugly into the rifled grooves in the gun’s barrel, and would thus be much more accurate than earlier musket balls. The bullet would be rotating when it came from the barrel of the rifle, and the spinning action gave it increased accuracy. The new bullet, which was commonly called the Minià © ball by the time of the Civil War, was extremely destructive. The version which was commonly used throughout the Civil War was cast in lead and was .58 caliber, which was larger than most bullets used today. The Minià © Ball Was Feared When the Minià © ball struck a human body, it did enormous damage. Doctors treating wounded soldiers were often perplexed by the damage caused. A medical textbook published a decade after the Civil War, A System of Surgery by William Todd Helmuth, went into considerable detail describing the effects of Minià © balls: The effects are truly terrible; bones are ground almost to powder, muscles, ligaments, and tendons torn away, and the parts otherwise so mutilated, that loss of life, certainly of limb, is almost an inevitable consequence. None but those who have had occasion to witness the effects produced upon the body by these missiles, projected from the appropriate gun, can have any idea of the horrible laceration that ensues. The wound is often from four to eight times as large as the diameter of the base of the ball, and the laceration so terrible that mortification [gangrene] almost inevitably results. Civil War Surgery Was Performed Under Crude Conditions Civil War amputations were performed with medical knives and saws, on operating tables which were often simply wooden planks or doors which had been taken off their hinges. And while the operations may seem crude by today’s standards, the surgeons tended to follow accepted procedures spelled out in the medical textbooks of the day. Surgeons generally used anesthesia, which would be applied by holding a sponge soaked in chloroform over the patient’s face. Many soldiers who underwent amputations did eventually die due to infections. Doctors at the time had little understanding of bacteria and how it is transmitted. The same surgical tools might be used on many patients without being cleaned. And the improvised hospitals were commonly set up in barns or stables. There are numerous stories of wounded Civil War soldiers begging doctors not to amputate arms or legs. As doctors had a reputation for being quick to resort to amputation, soldiers often referred to the Army surgeons as butchers. In fairness to the doctors, when they were dealing with dozens or even hundreds of patients, and when faced with the gruesome damage of the Minià © ball, amputation often seemed like the only practical option.