Ethics & Compliance

Throughout the course of the life of a corporation, business ethics will be encountered, questioned and reclassified. How a company complies with ethics depends on how well defined those ethics are within the organization. For too long, companies in general have not adequately looked at the unethical behavior in and of their organization. Corporations have been found with various degrees of unethical behavior, ranging from fraud, deception, bribery, corruption, marketplace manipulation and civil liberty violations just to name a few (Brief & Walsh, 2009). Enforcing ethical behavior and compliance with strict rules and regulations has fallen to the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). In the following paragraphs, Team C will assess the role of ethics and compliance within the company of Amazon.com, a publically traded business and one of the few organizations to come out of the dot-com phenomenon successfully. Using the organization’s annual reports and SEC filings from the past two years, the procedures used by Amazon.com will be described, and the processes used to comply ethically identified. The financial performance during these two years will be evaluated using financial ratios.

The role of ethics and compliance plays a major part in how Amazon.com functions as a business. All employees are required to adhere to a Code of Business Conduct and Ethics. Along with rules and stipulations regarding discrimination and harassment, conflicts of interest and health and safety, insider trading and compliance with laws are included. If the company expects the employees to behave ethically, it only follows that the company itself will do the same. This ethical behavior can be seen in the financial environment of Amazon.com and the way in which the reports required by the SEC are filed. Listed in the current quarterly report are statements declaring the consolidated financial information included in the report is a fair presentation of the company’s...