Dan Ariely

Every profession is bound by written and unwritten rules and policies; some of them are set by organizations while others are an integral part of the occupation you choose. For example, doctors have to swear by the Hippocratic Oath, lawyers cannot divulge any privileged attorney-client conversations, and priests cannot reveal what was said to them in the confessional. The same kind of ethical code exists in the profession of accountancy because it is a means of public service. As Robert H. Montgomery put it, “Accountants and the accountancy profession exist as a means of public service; the distinction which separates a profession from a mere means of livelihood is that the profession is accountable to standards of the public interest, and beyond the compensation paid by clients.”

However, accountants are plagued by deep ethical dilemmas – there may be times when their employers ask them to twist and tweak the financial position of the company because they’ve had a bad year. The usual spiel given is that they’re definitely going to rake in the profits in the months that follow and that the deficits that have been covered up this year will more than be taken care of in the years to come. So the accountant is left wondering if he/she should be loyal to their professional ethics or show loyalty to the company that has hired them.

To overcome this type of problems, ethics is taught as a subject when you choose to study accountancy, because you are responsible not just to your employer, but also to the general public who believe in your reports and statements and take important decisions based on your word. An important question here if course is how effective are ethics classes, and even if they are successful how long would their influence last (a week? a month? a year? 2 years?).  It is hard to believe that taking one or two classes on ethnics while studying accountancy is going to have a long term effect, and most likely higher standards and more strict definitions of continuing are needed (and maybe also higher frequency of education).

In other cases accountants are torn between reporting misbehaviors that are going on and between minding their own business – should they open up a can of worms and be at the center of a controversy or just take heart in the fact that they were true to the ethics of their profession? This type of cases present the “action inaction bias” where in general people view their own actions as much more important than inactions – which means that accountants are more likely to care about their own actions than about reporting the actions of others.  Yet, accountants must remember that they are accountable for not just their actions, but also their non-actions, if either tend to affect the public adversely.

Overall the study of accountancy, and understanding its challenges is not only important in its own right, but it also provide an important case from which to view problems of conflicts of interest

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Omar Adams, he writes on the topic of online accounting degrees . He welcomes your comments at his email id: omaradams47@gmail.com.

There is a certain perverse pleasure in contemplating the perfect crime.

You can apply your ingenuity to the hypothetical issues of choosing a target, evading surveillance and law enforcement, dealing with contingencies and covering your tracks afterward. You can prove to yourself what an accomplished criminal mastermind you would be, if you so chose.

The perfect crime usually takes the form of a bank robbery in which the criminals cleverly bypass all security systems using neat gadgets, rappelling wires and knowledge they’ve acquired over several weeks of casing the joint. This seems to be an ideal crime because we can applaud the criminals’ cunning, intelligence and resourcefulness.

But it’s not quite perfect. After all, contingencies by definition depend on chance, and therefore can’t ever be perfectly thought out (and in all good bank-robber movies, the thieves either almost get caught or do).  Even if the chances of being caught are close to zero, do we really want to call this a perfect crime? The authorities are likely to take it very seriously, and respond accordingly with harsh punishment. In this light, the 0.001 percent chance of getting caught might not seem like a lot, but if you take into account the severity of punishment, such crimes suddenly seem much less perfect.

In my mind, the perfect crime is one that not only yields more money, but is one where, if by some small chance you did get caught, no one would care, and the punishment would be negligible.

So, with this new knowledge how would you go about it?

First, the crime would need to be obscure and confusing, making it difficult to detect. Breaking a window and stealing jewelry is too straightforward. Second, the crime should involve many people engaging in the same type of crime so that no one can point a finger at you. This is why looting, though easy to detect, is much more difficult to get a handle on than a single robbery. Third, your crime will need to fall under the shady umbrella of plausible deniability so that if you do get caught, you can always say you didn’t know it was wrong in the first place. With this kind of defense, even if the public cares, the legal system may let you off easy. Moreover, plausible deniability allows you to apologize in the aftermath and ask forgiveness for your “mistake.”

If you really want to go all out, do something you can spin in a positive light, and maybe even create an ideology around it. This way you can then explain how you’re actually on the side of progress. Say, for instance, you’re “providing liquidity” and “lubricating the market” and thereby helping the economy – even if it happens to be by taking people’s money. You can also resort to opaque and promising-sounding language to make your case; you’re “restoring equilibrium,” “eliminating arbitrage” and creating “opportunity” and “efficiency” across the board.

Basically, just bottle snake oil and tell them it will cure, rather than cause, blindness.

Something to avoid, on the other hand, is anything involving an identifiable victim with whom people can sympathize and feel sorry for. Don’t rob one little old lady blind, or any one individual for that matter. It’s part of human nature that we care so much about blue-collar crime, even though the average burglary only costs about $1,300 (according to 2004 FBI crime reports), of which the criminal only nets a few hundred. Crimes like burglaries are the least ideal crime: they’re simple, detectable, perpetrated by a single or just a few people. They create an obvious victim and can’t be cloaked in rhetoric. Instead, what you should aim for is to steal a little bit of money from as many people as possible—little, old or otherwise — it doesn’t matter, as long as you don’t reverse the fortune of any one individual. After all, when lots of individuals suffer just a bit, people won’t mind as much.

So, what is the ideal crime?  Which activity is difficult to detect, involves many people, has plausible deniability, can be supported by an ideology and affects many people just a bit?  Yes, I think you know the answer, and it does involve banks…

Seriously, what we have here is a problem with our priorities. We have tremendous regulations for what is legal and illegal in the domain of possessions and blue-collar crime. But, what about regulations in banking?  It is not that I really think that bankers plan and plot crimes for a living (I don’t), but I do think they are continuously faced with tremendous conflicts of interests, and as a consequence they see reality in a way that fits their own wallets and not their clients.  The recent turmoil in the market is just a symptom of this conflict of interest problem, and unless we remove conflicts of interests from the banking system, we are going to be part of a long stream of perfect crimes.

This blog post first appeared on a website for a new PBS show called Need To Know

In compliance with a federal integrity agreement, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has just released details of its financial involvement with the medical community.

According to the New York Times, the drug maker disclosed that it paid $20 million in consulting and speaking fees to 4,500 doctors in the second half of 2009. The company also shelled out $15.3 million to U.S. academic medical centers for their clinical trials.

A few other drug makers have disclosed their doctor payments in the past, but this is the first time a company has disclosed its payments for clinical trials. As such, some may see this as a good deed on Pfizer’s part, a noble step towards eliminating or reducing some of the conflicts of interest in medicine.

Only, disclosure doesn’t seem to help. Several studies have shown that when professionals disclose their conflicts of interest, this only makes the problem worse. This is because two things happen after disclosure: first, those hearing the disclosure don’t entirely know what to make of it — we’re not good at weighing the various factors in any given situation — and second, the discloser feels morally liberated to act even more in his self-interest and to disregard what’s in the public good.

So, in this case Pfizer will likely feel even more entitled to disregard the public good, and the public, in turn, will not know what to make of the numbers. After all, what do you make of the numbers? It’s hard to figure out from a statement of disclosure just how much influence the conflict of interest had on the discloser, and to what degree we should be weary of them as a result.

The real issue here is that people don’t understand how profound this problem of conflicts of interest really is, and how easy it is to buy people. Doctors on Pfizer’s payroll may think they’re not being influenced by the drug maker — “I can still be objective!” they’ll say — but in reality, it’s very hard for us not to be swayed by money. Even minor amounts of it. Or gifts. Studies have found that doctors who receive free lunches or samples from pharmaceutical reps end up prescribing more of the company’s drugs afterwords.

It’s just a fact of human life: we have an ingrained need to reciprocate favors, and an ingrained inability to disregard what’s in our financial interest. As author Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Irrationally Yours,

Dan

According to a recent SmartMoney article, as many as 48% of U.S. dentists have seen their profits plummet thanks to the recession.

In and of itself, this isn’t a particularly remarkable statistic – after all, most of our wallets have taken a hit this past year – but what follows is an interesting discussion:  how are dentists coping with this drop in income? Angie C. Marek reports a variety of tactics in her article (including lowered rates, freebies, eliminated IOUs, etc.), most of which benefit the patient – but they don’t all. Rather, some dentists are softening the financial blow by upselling and overtreating patients.

One example is a woman who, upon switching cities and dentists, was surprised to learn that her hitherto problem-free mouth was suddenly a danger zone: several cavities required coatings, and two veneers needed replacement. Or so her dentist told her. In fact, though, this turned out to be just another case of overtreatment.

The problem here is conflicts of interests (COIs).  These are instances when professionals are pulled in two directions, torn between personal gain and the good of the patient. And the sad news is that when faced with COIs dentists (or physicians or cardiologists or other MD) often ends up going the self-interest route, and this can have undesirable consequences for the patient.

Not just a product of the recession, COIs have been a problem for some time now, and are actually very pervasive; you’ll find them everywhere in medicine. There’s the doctor who at once accepts consulting fees from a drug company and studies their drug, and the doctor who prescribes what a drug rep pushed on him the week before over a free lunch, and even the doctor who urges a treatment on a patient mostly so that he can use his costly new medical equipment.

But this isn’t to say that these are dishonorable people who only see dollar signs and say to hell with the patient. Rather, COIs can deeply color the person’s perception, and thereby end up influencing even the most upstanding citizens astray, and this happens often.

So, next time you are at the dentist – think about your dentist’s conflicts of interests.