The Right Thing

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Should landlord point out rent overpayment to tenant?

A reader, let's call her Lil, owns a two-family house in the Northeast. She and her family live in one apartment. Lil rents the other apartment out to another family. The renters, who have lived in the apartment, are on a month-to-month lease.

Since they started renting, Lil has only raised the rent once, and even then it was a minimal amount to help offset the increased cost of city water that Lil pays. The tenants pay for their own heat and electricity.

Last month, Lil noticed that the renter include $50 too much in the monthly rent check. She emailed the tenants to let them know and asked if they would like the $50 back or if they just wanted to take $50 off of the following month's rent.

One of the tenants who handles the bill was embarrassed she had wrote the check incorrectly and seemed to feel terrible about causing any inconvenience. Lil assured her it wasn't a bit deal. The tenant chose to simply pay $50 less for rent the following month.

When the following month's rent check arrived, it was for the agreed-upon monthly rent. No $50 deduction had been made.

"She felt awful last time about making the check out incorrectly," writes Lil. "Should I just forget about it and not point out her error again this month?"

Lil's inclination is to not say anything, mostly because she doesn't want to make her tenant feel bad. But is that the right thing to do?

It's understandable that Lil doesn't want her tenant to feel bad. Lil considers her and family to be great tenants, ones she can rely on to keep an eye on the house when Lil is out of town, to take the mail in occasionally, to pull the rubbish bins back in from the curb on trash day, or to help out with shoveling snow when a storm hits. They've been tenants for several years now and, knowing how hard it is to find good tenants, Lil doesn't want to make the tenant feel stupid.

But while Lil's intentions are good, the right thing to do is to return the $50.

Sure, the tenant made a mistake writing the check two months in a row, but that doesn't remove the fact that she overpaid. The extra money is hers, not Lil's.

Lil doesn't need to make a big deal about the overpayment -- and, given her past response, it's unlikely she would. But she should alert Lil to it.

She can simply email or tell her in person that she overpaid and ask how she would like the money returned. The same offer she made the previous month of giving her back $50 or simply letting the tenant take it off of her next rent check would take care of business.

At some point, the tenant is likely to recognize that she overpaid once again. When she does, her feeling foolish could turn to resentment if Lil says nothing.

But that's not the reason Lil should point out the error. In a relationship built on honesty, such as theirs has been, doing the right thing is necessary even if it might create a bit of awkwardness in the process.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin

Sunday, April 03, 2016

Should donors have a say in what donations are made in their names?

Should people have a say over what institutions their names are affiliated with, or at least be informed when their names are attached to the organization?

A reader writes that he recently came across a bulletin from a nonprofit institution with which he had an association in the past. He hasn't contributed to it for more than a decade, but he continues to receive literature from the organization.

On the annual list of donors, he saw that someone had made a donation in his name to the organization. There's no indication of who made the donation just that a donation had been made in his name.

It's not terribly unusual for some people in lieu of a gift to send a card or a note to someone letting them know that they've made a donation in someone's name to a charity. The recipient knows that a donation has been made, but they still haven't had a say in whether they want their name affiliated with a specific cause.

The intent of the donors is most likely good -- to give money to a worthy cause and to give credit or acknowledgement to a friend or an associate. But what if, like my reader, the recipient has a reason for no longer wanting to support the nonprofit someone else chose for him?

If the nonprofit is engaged in activities that recipients find morally abhorrent and it's unclear who made the donation in their names, the right thing is to contact the organization and ask that their names be removed from any materials. They should also ask that they be contacted if any future donations are made in their name. If it's clear who made the donation to an organization whose principles goes (should this be "go") against their beliefs, then the right thing is to let that person know as graciously as possible.

If, however, the organization is one about which the recipient has no moral qualms, my inclination would be to let it pass as a well-intentioned effort to do something good while simultaneously honoring a friend. Giving to others in need or worthy causes is a good thing. So is wanting to honor a friend.

The best right thing, however, would be to let donors choose which causes they want to support.

There are various ways to do this. Around the winter holidays, for example, one Facebook user routinely posts that he will donate $50 to his first 10 Facebook friends who post the name of their favorite charity. The only caveat is that the charities must have three- or four-star ratings from Charity Navigator. He makes a generous offer, honors his friends with the donations, but lets them choose who gets the money. His restriction on only giving to charities that are screened by Charity Navigator still lets the friends decide which charities they want to give to.

My reader will never have the opportunity to thank whoever honored him with the donation since it was made anonymously. Fortunately, he has no moral aversion to that organization's mission. He simply has other places he believes are more in need of whatever he (or someone in his name) has to give.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin