Essay About Business Ethics And Recent Allegations Of Fraudulent Practices

Ethics
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Business ethics has been an area of growing concern across the world in the last decade. While
considerable thought has gone into the effective management of business and ensuring its
steady growth across industries and economies, the role of ethics or moral obligations till recently
was more of a theoretical exercise in the academic circles. Corporate involvement in social obligations
remained largely limited to allocate a part of the annual budget for philanthropic work. However,
recent allegations of fraudulent practices, misappropriation of funds and willful suppression of facts
against some of the major transnationals in the world have made it necessary to understand the
fundamental role of business ethics. This article tries to capture the broad impact ethics on business
and how they can be incorporated in the policy guidelines of different stakeholder organizations to
ensure more transparent and profitable operations.
Business ethics can be described as business behavior based on standards of right or wrong rather
than entirely on principles of accounting and management (Hartman 1998). We can say it encompasses
practices and policies in business to determine what is ethically right and wrong.
What is ethically right and wrong in a given business situation depends on individual and corporate
value system and the choice made thereof. The cultural, organizational and industrial environment
along with personal experiences determines this choice. Due to its fundamental qualitative nature,
business ethics means different things to different people. Thus, though there is a general agreement
on the need of ethical standards in business, a consensus on specific standards is difficult to achieve.
This difficulty arises from the fact that standards of ethics are influenced by