Approaching the ethical analysis: Briefly describe the key facts of the situation. How is this an ethical situation? Who is helped and who is harmed? What dilemmas are apparent?
There are two key aspects to this situation. First, the way, MCI, a long-distance carrier, and provider, handled its accounting scenarios and second, the way the individual – Mr. Walt Pavlo went about handling the billing and collections in his department. The company was growing in a highly deregulated industry and encouraged its employees to strive for achieving the required target values and profit more than anything, and rewarded the employees who were able to achieve this through more and more stock options and quick promotions. On the other hand, …show more content…
This situation was aggravated by Pavlo’s bad apple behavior when he, instead of steering himself away from the company and this whole situation, decided to participate in this white-collar crime by embezzling money from the company by cooking up a scheme to get money out of the customers while continue to hide these amounts from the company by manipulating the accounting books. In retrospect, if Walt had resigned from the company way earlier than participating in such fraudulent actions and had instead become a whistleblower, it could have been a situation of only bad …show more content…
He completely ignored his responsibilities and assumed that his actions had no impact towards his duties whatsoever. In fact, he even ignored best practices which further weakens his clarity of making decisions. Pavlo also obviously fails the visibility test because he wouldn’t have wanted or liked to be in the headlines or on the cover of any newspaper or any business journal that discussed his actions at MCI. As far as generalizability is concerned, his actions and decision making were in accordance with his veil of ignorance as he believed that since everyone in the company was involved in these actions including the management who directed him with his next steps, it would be okay to take such dreadful actions. Finally, I don’t think what Pavlo did is something anyone would want to do to in order to leave any legacy behind. His decision making resulted in such a tainted legacy that is associated with one of the biggest scandals in the telecom industry. He is currently trying to salvage by associating himself with such seminars and Forbes’ articles but it will be difficult to take away that white-collar criminal image from