by Ann Nurse

Created on: April 01, 2009   Last Updated: September 15, 2010

  Integrity and Leadership

We are forced to ask the question, "Is integrity expected only from certain types of people?"  

We have seen more businessmen; politicians and famous people who have demonstrated total lack of integrity in the news lately.  The men and women on Wall Street walk as proudly as they did before it was made public they lacked integrity.  Should we conclude (the average American) if you have money, you don't need integrity?  Is integrity even expected anymore from everyone or just selected ones? If this is so, what sort of message are we sending/teaching our children?  Let us look at some individuals in high places who have been “Integrity Deficient .”

At the end of President George Bush's administration, the news became filled with stories of executives being arrested and indicted for shocking financial irregularities on Wall Street. One of the first scandals was the Enron scandal. The following legislation was enacted to address this fiasco. Congressman Michael Oxley, Republican from Ohio and chairman of the influential House Financial Services Committee co-sponsored the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.  Here is a definition of this act:

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (shortened to SOX) is legislation enacted in response to the high-profile Enron and WorldCom financial scandals to protect shareholders and the general public from accounting errors and fraudulent practices in the enterprise.  The act is administered by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which sets deadlines for compliance and publishes rules on requirements.  Sarbanes-Oxley is not a set of business practices and does not specify how a business should store records; rather, it defines which records are to be stored and for how long.

The legislation no only affects the financial side of corporations; it also affects the IT departments whose job it is to store a corporation’s electronic records.  The Sarbanes-Oxley Act states that all business records, including electronic records and electronic messages, must be saved for “not less than five years.”  The consequences for non-compliance are fines, imprisonment, or both.

This is basically what the act contains.  The premise of this act said that senior leaders must be able to personally vouch for the accuracy of company financial statements. Instead of things getting better on Wall Street, however, it became progressively worse, as

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