Compliance Week Articles

In August 2006, ERC President Patricia Harned started contributing a monthly column on ethics to the well-known national publication Compliance Week. This newsletter on corporate governance, risk and compliance reaches over 40,000 financial and legal executives at U.S. public companies electronically every Tuesday morning and is published as a glossy print magazine on the first day of the month. Compliance Week has granted permission for ERC to reprint Dr. Harned's columns after they have appeared in both the electronic and print versions.

For more information about Compliance Week or to subscribe, please visit http://www.complianceweek.com

August 8, 2007
Five Years After Sarbanes-Oxley, Signs That Smaller Public Companies Present Some of the Greatest Ethics Challenges
By Patricia Harned
Ethics Resource Center

Last month's fifth anniversary of the landmark Sarbanes-Oxley Act spurred a flurry of discussion in both business and political circles about that legislation's impact on business practices and its effectiveness in curtailing the kinds of abuses that brought down Enron, WorldCom and other giants early in this decade.

October 11, 2006
Personal Missteps Should Raise Eyebrows
By Patricia Harned
Ethics Resource Center

Many people firmly believe that what others do in their private lives should not matter to the office, as long as they are able to perform their jobs properly and safely. To a large extent this is true. But recently we've seen boards of directors investigate and take action when chief executive officers engage in behavior that generally is not associated their respective company's moral standards. Sometimes it seems that these leaders are forced out unfairly on the basis of rumor or gossip or even doing something everyone does. Is that right? At what point do an executive's personal mistakes warrant board attention?

August 1, 2006
The Subtle Presence of Corporate Ethics
By Patricia Harned
Ethics Resource Center

The August 1, 2006 column asks, "What do we actually mean by 'ethics' anymore?" Is it a goal, or a function? Has it been subsumed by something else? The answer is very simple, says Dr. Harned. Where there are people, there will be ethics--both good and bad.

September 14, 2006
The Risk of Being Ethically Tone Deaf at the Top
By Patricia Harned
Ethics Resource Center

Time and time again, we've heard policy-makers, pundits, and even prosecutors declare that for efforts to prevent and detect misconduct to succeed and an ethical culture to take root, the effort must come from the top.  But what exactly does tone at the top look like? How does it get established?