“Financial Reporting: Do Small Errors Need to be Reported “posted by Amanda Nelson on Santa Clara University is a Business ethics case. A new employee, Ben, in finance department of a traded publicly company did not report all the errors he found while doing a report for his manager. Because, Ben considers those errors as minor, and worries that by frequently sending out revising reports, he will seem unreliable. This case is related to disclosure violations and inaccurate financial reporting in the business environment. I will solve this case using Utilitarian, Kant and my own ethics approach. Utilitarianism is one of the approaches used by legislators to help them in their decision making. John Mill is one of those who conceived that approach, …show more content…
For the first decision, only him might be affected by the decision as he thought. The worst thing that can happen is for him to be seen as unreliable employee. But for the later decision that he choose, the case stated that “the potential consequences from inaccurate financial reports put the company, the CFO and CEO, and Ben himself at risk.” One can easily see that, the action that will produce the greatest benefits and the least harm is the first one. Because only Ben might be hurt by the decision, and the company, the CFO and CEO will not have to endure the consequence of that decision. Therefore, according to John Mill, it would have advised Ben to keep sending back the reports until there is no mistakes found in order to provide the greatest good for the most people in the …show more content…
I believe that the action of Ben not to report certain errors can be seen as denying relevant information to his supervisors and not allowing the supervisors the freedom of choice to treat the errors as minor or not. This is contrary to what Kant’s approach, because Kant said that one should treat people as ends in themselves and the characteristics of this notion are not to deny relevant information to people as well as allowing them freedom of choice. Therefore, Ben’s action does not respect the moral rights of everyone. So, Kant would have advised him to report all the errors that he