Many on Wall Street Say It Remains Untamed
In the study, to be released Tuesday, about a third of the people who said they made more than $500,000 annually contend that they “have witnessed or have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace.”
Just as bad: “Nearly one in five respondents feel financial service professionals must sometimes engage in unethical or illegal activity to be successful in the current financial environment.”
.. Its results appear even more noteworthy today for the sheer number of individuals who continue to say the ethics of the industry remain unchanged since the crisis (a third said that, by the way).
.. Nearly one-third of those asked “believe compensation structures or bonus plans in place at their company could incentivize employees to compromise ethics or violate the law.”
.. On virtually every question, those in Britain seem to indicate that ethics problems could be even more widespread there. “Respondents from the U.K. are either more willing to commit a crime they could get away with — or are more frank about it,” the report’s authors write.
.. Many of those asked said they worried “their employer would likely retaliate if they reported wrongdoing in the workplace.”
And quite a few said that they had signed, or been asked to sign, a confidentiality agreement that would prohibit them from reporting illegal or unethical behavior to the authorities.
.. Better commenters than I will tell you that corporations feel no shame