Morgan Stanley Case

Wk 2 Paper

October 12th, 2014

Morgan Stanley is an international brokerage firm that has a center of operations in Ohio. At the beginning of each quarter, the company hosts a retreat for the employees; this is organized with the goal to communicating any important announcements and changes from the corporate office in New York. The task of getting the refreshments and buying the food that was going to be offered was typically left up the assistant administrator of the site. The corporate credit card was given to this person and all of the purchases were made by them. The way the process was originally established to work was that at the end of each retreat, the receipt from the grocery store would be cross referenced with the food that was actually provided, to make sure that all the purchases were made for the purpose they were intended for, yet for some time, it had become common knowledge that the person in charge of verifying the purchases was not very diligent and would fail to do what they were supposed to. This essentially made it possible for the person in charge of making the purchases able to buy things that were not necessarily for the retreat and benefit from the lack of responsibility displayed by the other team members. While the assistant administrator was not supposed to misuse the company resources, she had the decision of taking advantage of the failing system or to complete her tasks honestly. Ultimately other people in the department had started taking advantage of the system as well, and she was in no position to blow the whistle as it would come back to her too.

Since I am very familiar with the people involved and the way the process is handled, if I was the in the position of the person in charge of making the purchases, I would have to weigh the possible consequences of my actions to determine if the potential benefit from taking advantage of the system would justify the risk. The potential stakeholders in my decision would be me as the person making the decision, the company as I am using their resources, my family since I could end up getting fired which would impact our economy negatively and my peers since it would make our group look dishonest altogether. The baseline standard when considering this decision would be that people in general are not supposed to use things that don’t belong to them for personal benefit. The natural alternative to my decision would be to act honestly and to not take advantage of the system. Based on my own moral and ethical standard, I would know that it is not the right thing to do yet knowing the background of how the system is set up, I cannot say that I would act differently even when considering that the possible consequences would be pretty terrible. Since “All these things involve breaking the rules and they’re all motivated by hostility toward or disregard