Whistle Blowers

Unit Three: Case Incident 2: Whistle Blowers: Saints or Sinners

Toniua Graham

Kaplan University

MT302 Organizational Behavior

December 30, 2010

Unit Three: Case Incident 2: Whistle Blowers: Saints or Sinners

This case is about whistle-blowing and ethics. I am going to discuss what whistle-blowing is, the rewards and downside to whistle-blowing by employees, and the ethical issues that employees face when they decide to become a whistle-blower.

Whistle-blowing is a way for any employee that feels and can prove that the company he/she is working for is participating in corporate misbehavior, to be able to report their company’s wrongdoings and be protected from any backlash that the company may try to take on the individual who is blowing the whistle on them. Because of the scandals that certain corporations have been involved in such as Enron and WorldCom, the government had to come up with a way to keep the investors interest within a company safe from money-hungry management that only had their interest in mind instead of their investors, The government came up with the Sarbanese-Oxley Act which provided for employees within a corporation to be able to report the wrongdoings of management, which could be the violation of a law, a rule, regulations that should be followed, or not keeping the investors interest in mind.

In the case involving Mr. Douglas Durand, I feel that his intentions may have been good to begin with but in the end his intentions may have shifted toward the financial reward at the end of the rainbow. I believe that when he realized the amount of money that he could make off of blowing the whistle on his former employee it took over for his actual intentions. The reason I say this is because he took a $35,000 bonus when he knew he was getting ready to quit and bring a lawsuit against the company. Why would he do this knowing that he would collect a large sum of money from the suit if won? Mr. Durand is a prime example of an injustice...