Jeff Kaplan is a partner in the Princeton, New Jersey office of Kaplan & Walker LLP and an Ethical Systems Collaborator.
One of the most powerful episodes in risk-assessment history is the story of the Maginot Line, which the French military had deployed after WWI to prevail in any future trench warfare against the Germans. The latter, however, had other plans and so were able to outflank the former in WWII, with catastrophic consequences. Is there […]
Honesty pledges often sound like a good idea, but whether they are in any given situation depends on various factors. Just ask Jim Comey. In a recent paper, Eyal Pe’er, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Yuval Feldman, at Bar-Ilan University, take up the topic of honesty pledges. In their study, Pe’er and Feldman explored how pledges […]
Should compliance be subordinated to legal, rather than separated from it? Yes, argues Sean J. Griffith, of the Fordham University School of Law, in a recent paper, titled “Agency, Authority, and Compliance.” This is an interesting and unusual perspective and one that I am not unsympathetic to. The abstract states: Compliance officers owe their professional existence […]
Many years ago I was asked by a prospective client if I could design a “C minus” (i.e., just barely passing) compliance program for them. I responded that, for various reasons, by aiming for a C minus they were likely to end up with an “F.” I did not get the gig. But would there […]
In a classic Watergate-era Doonesbury, Mark asks a rhetorical question. Is it fair to judge the ethicality of the White House based solely on the various cases and allegations that had surfaced during that scandal? No it isn’t, he replied: those are only the ones we know about. One of the latest Trump conflicts of […]
One of the more complex and instructive business scandals of the 1980s concerned fraud in the sale of specialty pipe.
Research I reported on several years ago suggests working from home could make a positive ethical difference.
Behavioral ethics is a well known field of social science which shows—due to various cognitive biases—“how we are not as ethical as we think.” Practitioners of behavioral compliance and ethics (C&E), which is less well known, use behavioral-ethics insights to develop and maintain effective compliance programs. How do they do that? This should be viewed on two levels. […]
In 1973, in speaking to colleagues on the Cook County Democratic Committee, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago defended his having directed a million dollars of insurance business to an agency on behalf of his son John with the immortal words: “If I can’t help my sons, then [my critics] can kiss my ass. I make […]
There was a time in my life when I might have embraced the cause of socialism, but that was many years ago, and today I proudly march under the banner of centrism. And the current flirtation with socialism in the U.S. has me worried—at least a little bit. My concern is not that the […]
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