Whistleblowers May Not Have Integrity
A whistleblower will receive up to 10-30% of the fines paid by an employer for an SEC violation. The False Claim Acts will allow whistleblowers to receive 15-25% of the fines paid. If someone has impure motives for doing the right thing, should that be considered an act of integrity?
Be careful how you answer this, because we can all have ulterior motives at times. We may look good from the outside, but why did we really do the right thing?
One act of integrity we should consider is the corporate whistleblower that exposes a company for unethical business practices that break federal laws.
The United States Federal Government currently has incentives in place to encourage whistleblower to step forward. Some companies are now paying fines that reach into the billions of dollars. Two famous cases awarded the whistleblowers $102 million and $104 million respectively!
That is an amazing payout for someone who makes the choice to do the right thing. I am not arguing against rewarding whistleblowers. I just think we all need to consider motives before we claim someone (or ourselves) to be a bastion of integrity.
Here is a question to consider:
Is this truly an act of integrity if the whistleblower’s primary motive for doing the right thing is the monetary reward they will receive?
Judging another person’s motives is a bad practice. Most of the time, the only person who truly knows our motives is ourselves. In this case, the only person who knows the true motives of the whistleblower is the whistleblower himself.
But consider the question anyway.
Is this truly an act of integrity if the motives of the individual originated from a place of self-interest?
If this is true, I believe this was not integrity in action. Motives matter.
For another blog on doing the right thing when it is hard to do, click on the following title:
Integrity: Compromise or Consequences
The Bottom Line:
I hope and pray most of you will not find yourself in a position to be a whistleblower in a federal case. But we are likely to be tested in other ways.
- Am I really acting with integrity if I pick up the trash on the sidewalk just because someone might be watching? Would I still pick up the trash if no one were watching?
- Am I speaking up for the underprivileged because I want my friends to see I am compassionate? Would I still speak up if my friends were not involved?
- Am I giving to a school or to a charity, because I think I will get some sort of recognition in a brochure or at a banquet? Would I still give the same amount anonymously?
Motives matter. If I do anything – no matter how good it looks – out of selfish motives am I acting with integrity?
Question:
What do you think?
While there are cases when a whistleblower’s incentive is to profit from coming forward, more cases stem from a person who find themselves in an untenable position of participating and unwittingly contributing to unethical or criminal conduct. After this conduct has been identified and brought to the attention of the senior management of a company and or the compliance department of a company and the company continues to practice unethical and/or criminal behavior the whistleblower may seek and should seek legal counsel to protect not only themselves but to protect other innocent parties being harmed by the unethical and or criminal behavior. This action is often taken to protect tax payers and patients who rely on a limited source of funds included in Federal Medicare and State Medicaid systems. Estimated fraud each year in these programs runs in the billions of dollars. The false claims act is also utilized to deter fraud in government contracts who provide services and supplies to our military and other public services sector. Every dollar taken through fraud is one less dollar available to our servicemen including the Veteran’s Administration which has been so conspicuously in the news over the past ten years due to fraud and gross mismanagement. These issues would not have been brought to the public’s attention without the courage and conviction of whistleblowers.
Most whistleblowers would prefer that the action of blowing the whistle was not necessary and most whistleblowers find themselves unemployed and locked out of their chosen professional fields due to their whistleblowing becausee the company’s stance is the whistleblower is acting with an incentive of self service and self profit. Ironic,considering the whistleblower is reporting greed perpetrated by the company.
Yes there are a few serial whistleblowers, but most are hard working, every day people, who are brave enough to step forward and risk their own careers and submit themselves to slander and abuse, submit their families to years of financial and emotional stress by the very people they have reported. Whistleblowers don’t do it for the money, they do it because it is the right thing to do and they have been given no other options.
Your defense of whistleblowers is right on target. I agree with you wholeheartedly about most of the whistleblowers.
The point of this blog is to make us all to think about our motives when we claim to be doing the right thing.
The vast majority of whistleblowers do it for the right motives. As I say in the blog many times: Motives Matter!
Just because I do the right thing does not make me a person of integrity unless my motives are pure.
Dave,
The more I see of your work, the more I like it. I especially like pieces that challenge conventional wisdom with reasoned arguments. You make an excellent point in this piece.
Challenging conventional wisdom, I would also say that individual self-interest has largely been the driving force in creating the greatest economic force in the history of the world, namely the U.S. as it was originally constituted. We just need to avoid the immoral, illegal and repugnant.
Keep up the thought provoking pieces.
All the best,
Bill
Center for Leadership Excellence
Thank you Bill! I appreciate the encouraging words! Please share my blogs with others as you see fit!
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Dave – In order to answer your questions, you first have to define integrity. If you define it as the alignment of an individual’s beliefs, words, and actions, then it could be possible for whistleblowers who earn large rewards to have integrity. Should their core values be money, recognition, etc there would be alignment.
It is vital that individuals know what their core values are, and that companies who hire ensure the alignment of those values with the values of the company. What’s your personal definition of integrity?
Nancy,
I am careful with declaring someone’s can have integrity based on their own values. Otherwise you could say that Hitler had integrity because his beliefs, words and actions were aligned.
My definition: Doing what is good and right and proper even if it costs me personally.
There are some universal values that are deep inside of all of us. The majority want these things in others and in themselves.
That is why we are upset when a man pushes an elderly woman out of the way to get off a burning plane, a train engineer causes a crash because he is drinking, a politician cheats on his taxes, or any group kills innocent non-combatants.