Ethical Ethics Of Whistleblowing

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In a general form, whistleblowing occurs when a person exposes activity that is illegal, unethical or incorrect within an organization. When this happens, many controversial issues come into play. The whistleblower becomes untrusted in the workplace, the business's reputation gets pulled into the line of fire, and the act of whistleblowing becomes abused.
Although there are laws put into place to protect whistleblowers, there is no law protecting what individuals think about one another. When an employee takes the correct step of exposing illegal doings, there are many aspects that need to be looked at. If a whistleblower takes the proper steps to handle the bad situation, the statement works its way through the chain of command. Depending …show more content…

If the problem is substantial, the owner of the company has many things to think about. Mainly, whether or not the statement will hurt the businesses reputation. According to Michael McMillan, author of Retaliation against Whistleblowers: No Good Deed goes Unpunished in the Enterprising Investor's Collection of the CFA Institute, ethics in a business has to be the main key to success. Otherwise there is room for exceptions that become larger problems. To ignore a whistleblowing statement, even if it's best for the company to let it slide under the rug, will pile up that will eventually be unable to ignore. Ignoring the problem will leave the owner with multiple liabilities. In most cases, those liabilities are: the whistleblower knowing that their statement is being ignored, the wrongdoing continues to happen and the build up will only make a bigger explosion. In heated situations that could potentially hurt the company, owners and decision makers will want to place blame. They intend to put the blame on someone else to ensure the company does not go down. This leaves the original Whistleblower with a big decision, is it important enough to risk it …show more content…

They take pride in Ethical standards and created the IMA Statement of Ethical Professional Practice. There is a list of standards members need to abide by, they are: Competence, Confidentiality, Integrity and Credibility. Within those categories there are rules and steps to take in order to resolve ethical issues. In the Snowden Case, he did not follow this code of ethics or really any other type of business ethics. He did not speak to a manager or go to any type of member in his line of work when he found a problem. Snowden lied to his work and family claiming he had to get testing done on his epilepsy problem for a week in a hospital. Instead he went to another country in hopes of blowing the whistle on the United States

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