You are a recent college graduate with only a year of experience with your emplo
ID: 461358 • Letter: Y
Question
You are a recent college graduate with only a year of experience with your employer. You were recently promoted to manager of email services. You are quite surprised to receive a phone call at home on a Saturday from the Chief Financial Officer of the firm asking that you immediately delete all email from all email servers, including the archive and back-up servers, that is older than six months. He states that the reason for his request is that there have been an increasing number of complaints about the slowness of email services. In addition, he says he is concerned about the cost of storing so much email. This does not sound right to you because you recently have taken several measures that have speeded up email services. An alarm goes off when you recall muted conversations in the lunchroom last week about an officer of the company passing along insider trader information to an executive at a hedge fund. What do you say to the Chief Financial Officer?
Explanation / Answer
From the conversation of the CFO and the recall of muted lunchroom conversation, it is clear that senior executives including the CFO are involved in insider trading.
This situation presents an ethical dilemma. As an employee of the company, I am responsible to carry out the orders of senior management and the CFO. However, as a responsible citizen and as per professional standards of ethics, I have the moral obligation to report the wrongdoings.
However, If I straightaway refuse to the CFO to delete the emails, there will be risk of CFO firing me, and getting the task carried out by another employee. Consequently, I’ll end up losing the job as well as the evidence of the insider trading activities will be lost.
Therefore, I’ll tell the CFO that I’ll do as directed.
Then I’ll store the archive of the emails and delete the emails from the main server and report the matter to SEC about my suspicion of insider trading taking place in my company. Reason for reporting the matter directly to SEC, without reporting to anyone else in my company is that, since senior management is directly involved, therefore, there is no one else in the company who can take action against the senior management for their wrong doings.
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