Betty Vinnon Case Study

Case One Project: “WorldCom’s Betty Vinson and Cynthia Cooper”
1.) Loyalty to your profession and professional standards is the most important for a business professional to maintain in their career no matter what when it comes to ethical issues that may occur in the workplace. You obviously want to care for the company you work for and ensure its great success, but when that company influences an individual to engage in unethical activity in order to profit or remain in business, then an individual’s duty to their employer diminishes when it conflicts with their personal morals. As stated in an article by the Josephson Institute, an organization that strives to create an ethical society, “In today’s ultra competitive, high tech, interdependent

Betty Vinson, on the other hand, made the decision to partake in the unethical behavior because she didn’t want the company to go out of business and risk losing her job. By following through with that act, however, she has dramatically damaged her image as a business professional and people will now think negatively of her personal character, which “is critical to sustainable success because it is the basis of trust and credibility. Both of these essential assets can be destroyed by actions which are, or are perceived to be unethical” (Josephson, M.,

In terms of the competence level of the CMA, we could see that when Vinson was in her professional workplace environment, she failed to be in accordance with business laws and regulations by manipulating and lying on federal company document records. Next, when considering the standard of confidentiality, it shows in the case how Cynthia Cooper saw confidential company information and kept it a secret until she noticed that there was a discrepancy involved with it that would impact the company from a legal standpoint, and so she knew that she needed to take action. She followed the CMA appropriately by “informing all relevant parties regarding the appropriate use of confidential information” and she “monitored subordinates’ activities to ensure compliance” (Ethical Principles of a CMA, 2015). She also met the credibility portion of the CMA in this manner by speaking to all relevant parties about the issue in a fair and timely manner while making all of them know that this issue could influence people’s perspective or understanding of the data that is presented to them in the reports. Finally, we can see from the integrity section of the CMA that Betty Vinson failed to avoid a company conflict of interest by not communicating to the necessary business associates or third parties about the unethical issue when