When ethics and reality collide

http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56527002

When ethics and reality collide
By Christopher Ram
Stabroek News
Friday, August 17th 2007

Amid concerns that recent amendments to the Guyana Forestry Commission
Act will effectively gag those who might be tempted to take information
out of the Guyana Forestry Corporation, there has been the issue Mr.
Dennis Daniel, the Director of Air Safety Regulation whose service
according to the press was terminated after 'blowing the whistle as to
the inappropriate location of the site for the radar tower.' He is said
to have discovered the technical unsoundness of the plans and the
concomitant dangers to flight navigational systems at the airport.

While allegations swirl that Mr Daniels was not even extended the
basic requirement of natural justice that he be given an opportunity to
answer any charge and that he is therefore being treated unfairly,
Minister of Transport and Hydraulics Robeson Benn who has oversight for
the investigation being conducted by the Guyana Civil Aviation
Authority appears to have gone missing in action.

What in fact is whistle-blowing and why is it that employers including
governments seem to regard blowers as traitors deserving of the most
extreme action? And what can an employee in the public or private
sector do when s/he finds that the boss is engaging in lies and
cover-ups? Should s/he remain silent and thereby become a party to the
wrong doing, approach the boss or give the information to someone who
can put it in the public or other appropriate domain?

The experiences in Guyana and indeed even in countries where
whistle-blowing has statutory protection suggest that to challenge the
boss is like committing suicide and at best there will be some
inducement to the employee to stay silent or some threat of
consequences if the employee takes the matter further. I have written
before about an experience I had several years ago when I was employed
with another audit firm when an employee of a major client of that firm
approached me with information about wrongdoings of senior employees.
Follow-ing discussions between the audit firm and client, the employee
was offered employment with the audit firm!

Surely employers expect loyalty from their employees but is there not
an assumption that the employer would act not only legally but
ethically and properly as well? Employers ought to realise that when
they themselves act improperly, they are devaluing the moral content of
that organization and sending the wrong message to the employees. Can
there be a link then between the improprieties by public and private
officials and the level of corruption, embezzlements and frauds that
are taking place with such frequency in Guyana?

What then is Whistle-blowing? A working definition would be 'the
unauthorized disclosure of information that an employee reasonably
believes evidences the contravention of any law, rule, or regulation,
code of practice, or professional statement, or that involves
mismanagement, corruption, abuse of authority, or danger to public or
worker health and safety.'

Not surprisingly, as a country that places the highest value on freedom
of speech, which incidentally is guaranteed by our Constitution, the
United States has had a long tradition of protecting employees who
reported matters to any member of Congress or to regulators and such
openness has been widely expanded even in the case of companies.

With the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Corporate Reform Act of 2002
following a wave of corporate scandals typified by Enron, internal and
external whistleblower protection was extended to all employees in
publicly traded companies for the first time. The provisions of
Sarbanes-Oxley:

Make it illegal to "discharge, demote, suspend, threaten, harass or in
any manner discriminate against" whistleblowers

Establish criminal penalties of up to 10 years for executives who
retaliate against whistleblowers

Require board audit committees to establish procedures for hearing
whistleblower complaints

Allow the secretary of labor to order a company to rehire a terminated
employee with no court hearing

Give a whistleblower the right to a jury trial, bypassing months or
years of administrative hearings

The UK too has moved very much in this direction and some professional
accounting bodies such as the Institute of Chartered Accountants of
Ireland, not only protect, but require their members to whistleblow in
given circumstances. Hopefully, Guyana will see a similar need in the
regulated sectors of the economy, particularly, Financial Institutions,
Insurance Companies, Cambios, and in money laundering matters
generally.

But we must again refer to the United States where a 2002 article in
Business Week called 2002 the "Year of the Whistleblower" (the same
year in which Time Magazine named three whistleblowers as its Persons
of the Year). The Business Week article quoted Stephen Meagher, a
former federal prosecutor who represents whistleblowers, as saying that
"the business of whistleblowing is booming."

Think of what the world would have been without these whistleblowers:

Dr Jiang Yanyong who broke ranks in China and persuaded his government
to publicly reveal and confront the spread of SARS.

Harry Templeton who looked media magnate Robert Maxwell in the eye and
challenged his plundering of the pension fund.

At WorldCom, Cynthia Cooper pushed forward with an internal audit,
alerting the Board of Directors Auditing Committee to problems, despite
being asked by the company's CFO to postpone her investigation.
Similarly, at Enron, accountant Sherron Watkins outlined the company's
problems in a memo to then-CEO Kenneth Lay who died while on trial for
corporate wrong-doing.

Not too long ago Marc Hodler, IOC member blew the whistle on the Winter
Olympic bid scandal for the 2002 Salt Lake City games. And perhaps the
greatest whistleblower of them all, W. Mark Felt aka Deep Throat, a
secret informant who in 1972 leaked information about United States
President Richard Nixon's involvement in Watergate. The scandal
eventually led to the resignation of the president, and prison terms
for White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and presidential adviser
John Ehrlichman

As evidence that whistleblowing can have consequences beyond that
suffered by Mr. Dennis Daniel, two examples might be useful, one from
India and the other from the Philipines:

S. Manjunath, formerly a manager at Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOCL),
and crusader against adulteration of petrol was shot dead on November
19, 2005, allegedly by a petrol pump owner from Uttar Pradesh. And
Marlene Garcia Esperat, a former analytical chemist for the Philippines
Department of Agriculture who became a journalist to expose
departmental corruption, and was murdered for it in 2005.
Interestingly, her assailants later surrendered to police, and
testified that they were hired by officials in the Department of
Agriculture.