1. It is impossible to determine whether corporate crime, or lower-grade nefarious activity—i.e. “corporate sleaze”—has become more common or less common in recent years. The difficulties of making statistical comparisons are discussed in Ross Irwin, Shady Business (New York, NY: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1992), pp. 6–15. Ross does, however, reach this tentative conclusion:
2. The Ethics Resource Center, in a recent survey of 700 U.S. companies, the firms with the most important ethics issues facing these firms were: Drug and alcohol abuse, employee theft, conflicts of interest, quality control, discrimination, abuse of proprietary information, abuse of expense accounts, plant closings and layoffs, misuse of company assets, and environmental pollution. Few of these issues figured prominently in the dilemmas described by the interviewees, suggesting again a significant difference between the way ethics is viewed at the top of an organization and a view from the trenches. See Ethics Policies and Programs, a report by the Ethics Resource Center and the Behavior Research Center, Washington, D.C., 1990, pp. 4–5.