If I suspect my co-worker is cheating, should I report it?

For several years, a reader has struggled with how or if to address what she sees as unethical behavior in her workplace. At the large organization where she works, all hourly employees are "required" to record their work hours on a telephone "punch in and out" system. One of her co-workers for years has not used the telephone system and instead has submitted a handwritten time card, which the boss then inputs into the system.

"Those of us who work with that person know that lunches taken are not one hour, but closer to two hours most days," the reader writes. "Every day."

She also reports that his start times are actually later than what she and some of her coworkers believe is being reported. Plus, he's leaving before he puts in a full eight-hour day.

"The boss has always come in late, so may not know this," the reader writes. She and her co-workers believe, however, that the boss does know that the information he's inputting into the system is not accurate. He certainly knows that the co-worker is not meeting the "requirement" of using the telephone system to accurately record his hours.

After the boss retired about a year ago, a new administrator "has allowed the same fraud" to continue.

While she and her co-workers don't want to "tattle or be responsible for someone losing their job," they want to know how to get this to stop.

"Our company is always talking about doing the right thing and principles of responsibility and we are tired of this fraud being perpetrated by the employee and administration," she writes. The company has a compliance hotline, but she isn't sure that it is anonymous.

"Should we write a letter to the administrator?" she asks. "Or should we continue to ignore it?"

If the reader has evidence that the coworker is behaving unethically and defrauding her company by getting paid for hours he doesn't work, then she should report it. The challenge, however, is that without seeing the co-worker's paycheck or the handwritten information he submits, it's hard to know how much time he's actually reporting or how much time the boss has been recording for him. She and others may have witnessed the coworker violating the company rules by not punching in to the required system, however, so that violation seems backed by evidence.

If the suspicion exists that the coworker and the boss are behaving unethically and this is causing the reader and others concern, the right thing would be to first use the compliance hotline that the company has in place. Since the behavior is clearly resulting in the reader and her coworkers' questioning how seriously the company is about employees doing the right thing, her next step might be for them to ask for a meeting with the administrator to discuss their concerns.

Sixty percent of workers who responded to a KPMG survey on integrity in the workplace indicated that unethical behavior is likely to result if employees believe a company's "code of conduct is not taken seriously."

The right thing for the reader's company to do is to take her and her colleagues' concerns seriously and make sure that management is holding everyone to the same ethical behavior on the job. 

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 

(c) 2017 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

How much to cry over drunken wine

Once a month, a group of long-time friends makes a point of meeting one another for lunch at a downtown restaurant. A few weeks ago, the four friends met at a sizeable new upscale eatery that had taken over the entire food court of a shopping mall in the middle of the city near where each of them live. The new place isn't really one restaurant, but a grouping of different types of food purveyors -- some sit-down restaurants, some small fresh food shops, a few aisles of groceries, and assorted other merchants.

After meeting at the mall, their first goal was to decide where to eat. They chose one of the small sit-down restaurants. They received menus, studied them, and then prepared to place their orders. Each of them chose to order a glass of wine to accompany her meal. After the first three ordered, the last of the friends requested a glass of merlot. The waiter responded that they didn't carry merlot, but that he'd be glad to serve her a comparable substitute. She agreed.

When the orders came, the merlot seeker took a sip of her wine. It was not quite the type of wine she typically enjoyed, but after being encouraged by her friends to send it back if she didn't like it, she decided to keep it.The friends ate their meals, catching up with one another throughout.

Finally, when the bill for the meal arrived, the merlot seeker was surprised that while her friends' glasses of wine were each $11, the wine that the waiter had chosen for her as a substitute for merlot was $19.

"Instead of choosing something for me that resembled a merlot," she writes, "it seems clear that he decided to sell me one of the more expensive glasses on the menu."

Even though the merlot seeker offered to pay a bit more for her share of the bill, her friends told her not to be ridiculous and that they'd split the bill evenly four ways as was their custom.

"Now, I think I should have said something to the waiter," she writes. "Was I wrong not to?"

She wasn't wrong not to say anything at the time if she chose not to. But it also would not have been inappropriate to broach the topic with the waiter.

The right thing, however, would have been for her to ask the waiter what wine he was recommending after he made the offer and to ask him to show it to her on the menu. Doing it that way might have made her feel less self-conscious than asking about the price, although it would have been fair for her to do that as well.

The waiter should have offered to show her the wine on the menu without her having to ask, or to tell her the price. That would have been the right thing to do and it would have enhanced the possibility that the friends would be return customers. She drank it, so she paid for it. But their next gathering, she says, will be someplace else. 

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 

(c) 2017 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.