Using Company Resources

Summary of situation

XYZ Corporation allows employees to borrow company tools for their own personal

projects. Al House, an engineer at XYZ Corporation, took full advantage of this opportunity as

he regularly borrowed tools from the company. The ethical dilemma began when Al started to

purchase tools that were solely for his personal projects at home. The tools were not useful for

his unit at XYZ and thus created an issue where Al was abusing his privilege to borrow tools.

Engineer Michael Green overheard a revealing conversation between the contract salesman, Bob

Deal, and Al which left Michael with the ethical dilemma of whether to report Al to the chief

engineer who he does not trust or to not say anything and allow Al to continue to use the

company’s money in a wrongful manner.

Discussion of ethical dilemma

Al House took advantage of the company’s policy on allowing employees to take tools

home. He knowingly chose to purchase tools that were not needed for the company and showed

ethically poor decisions in abusing the privilege he was given. Michael Green was faced with an

ethical dilemma between coming forth with his knowledge of Al’s wrongful purchasing of tools

and possibly have Al find out who told on him, or to say nothing and allow Al to continue abusing

his tool privilege. The ethically correct choice is to say something to the chief engineer, but

Michael does not believe his discussion will be held in confidence. He is worried about being

revealed and dealing with a confrontation with Al or having to lie to Al in order to prevent a

confrontation. Doing the ethically correct thing might lead to issues at his job and may cause him

to lose contracts or a future promotion. Eventually Michael decides to do the right thing but
chooses to talk with the Contract Procurement Agent. His conversation was held in confidence and

Al was eventually confronted by the chief engineer. However, when Al tries to confront his

coworkers about who told on him, Michael was forced to lie about having no knowledge of the

situation. This causes Michael some moral strain as he felt he had no choice but to lie in order to

keep his job in line.

Case Question – Discuss the ethical issues this case raises.

According to the IEEE Code of Ethics, it is important to avoid real or perceived conflicts

of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist. It was

the ethical responsibility of Michael Green to disclose the wrongdoing by Al House to the

company. While typically a conflict of interest may be viewed as giving a contract to a family

member or choosing a company that someone has invested in, Al had a conflict of interest in

making tool purchases to complete his projects at home without buying the tools himself. He had

a responsibility to disclose that he wanted the tool for his home projects and by keeping this a

secret, he violated this code of ethics. Upon Michael overhearing this, he was now faced with the

ethical dilemma to disclose Al’s conflict of interest to the company. Despite the repercussions that

may have been inflicted on Michael, he would have violated this code of ethics had he have kept

Al’s wrongdoing a secret. It was his responsibility to speak out against what Al was doing in order

to keep his agreement with the engineering code of ethics.