Chapter 5
‘Reinventing oneself’
Because Chris has been living paycheck-to-paycheck, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to be financially stable. His aspirations have been similar to most people. Chris wanted to have a nice family, a big house, and a couple of decent, reliable cars. He wanted to achieve this by attending good schools and then entering the corporate world; after which, he would maintain a high level, steady job, one that would contribute to making a positive difference in the world. Simply put, he would achieve the American Dream. Isn’t that what most people want?
Now it seems to him that there have been two things standing in his way of achieving it: honesty and integrity. It’s these two qualities that have kept him from fulfilling his hopes and dreams. He has his father to blame for it. His dad lived and breathed these qualities, and it didn’t matter the cost. Though, in the end, the cost came at his father’s expense indirectly affecting the whole family, yet being ethical made sense at the time. These are good qualities to possess. According to his dad, there is no room for dishonesty in this world, and although he had a strong work ethic and was a hard worker, Chris’s family struggled financially. They lived in a house, had several cars, and all the kids attended good schools. But this is the misperception in society and is not necessarily an indication of being financially stable. In reality, it’s often the opposite. The house was mortgaged and the cars were owned by the bank. Chris never did see a pink slip to any of the cars, and as far as the children’s education was concerned, today Chris and his sisters are still paying for their school loans.
The dream they thought they had achieved was leased at a high price. They struggled and paid more than twice in interest for what they believed was the American dream. Looking back, they were just trying to survive and were caught in the rat race. They didn’t own anything of significance. The bank owned it all. They just borrowed all these things and have been paying high interest to rent them ever since. They were sucked into it. Most people in a capitalistic society lease their dreams and have the illusion that they are actually achieving their financial goals. As Goethe states in regards to debt, “None are more helplessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
At this point in his career, Chris makes decent money but doesn’t own anything and is spending more than what he brings in. Overall, however, Chris hasn’t minded because he’s enjoyed the journey. He’s had a lot of fun and great memories, too. He knows what being owned by banks feels like. He knows what it’s like to lease a life. If he purchased a car, he wanted to own it outright. He has not wanted to lease the dream like his father had done. The former President John Adams commented that you enslave a nation by economics and debt. It’s what a capitalistic society does. He doesn’t want to be enslaved anymore.
Chris’s approach to issues at work now has to be flipped. Regardless of the seriousness, he needs to downplay them and whenever a situation surfaces, he needs to spin it as a positive somehow. He also needs to avoid documenting issues as much as possible. In an industry that requires documentation for just about everything, it’s going to take time to get used to it.
In this new phase, Chris gets more involved with other departments. This in turn opens the door to more problems. One of the situations he encounters is that the company is storing patient data on an FTP site. It’s one that’s open to the public, and the public account has never been changed, which is considered a HIPPA violation. It’s not certain if anyone ever sees the data but it’s out there for the public to view, and patients would not be thrilled about it. Chris is still in the learning phase of framing so he checks with Paul about the situation. Paul tells Chris to see if he can move the data without causing much of a stir, which means working with the clinical department and changing their process. The current method, which has been going on for years, is set up to dump all patient data on a share that’s mapped to this FTP site and accessible to the public.
In the end, Chris is able to pull it off. The owner of the data asks IT the purpose for moving it, and he says it’s because they need more disk space. That was easy. He guesses that they can always use more disk space. She doesn’t have to know that everybody from the outside world can access their patient data. Nobody has to know, and hopefully, no one has already accessed the information.
Another problem that surfaces is related to a domain admin account. A domain admin account is one that has privileges to do anything in the environment. It can create other accounts, modify security, access any type of data, etc. It’s a coveted power user in the computer world and unusual for users to share this type of account. Employees that need these types of privileges normally have their own individual account, which is good security practice. In the event that something goes sour or someone is troubleshooting an issue, it’s easy to track down who is involved. So an IT Director sharing a domain admin account with three other employees, two vendors and about four other previous employees is even more atypical. With this type of setup, upper management can modify or delete any data and no one would know who executed the transaction even when an audit trail is flagged. This is at least one way it can be done. So in Chris’s next meeting with Paul, he brings the issue up.
“Paul, it seems like we have an account with elevated privileges that is shared.”
“What can this account do?”
“Well it’s a domain admin account.”
“Okay, so is that something bad? Give me an example of what it can do.”
Here we go again, Chris thinks to himself, “Information Technology 101,” having to explain a domain account to the Director of IT.
“Well, you can create users, modify security, add devices to the network among several other things.”
“Okay, so what’s the issue?”
“Well each of us should be using individual accounts. We should not be sharing an account.”
“Well, maybe we need to share accounts.”
“It’s not good practice to share accounts.” Chris is getting frustrated but can see Paul is trying to process the concept or attempt to just let it blow over. At this point, he can sense when Paul is struggling because he gets a certain look on his face.
“Chris, let’s say you’re in a room with five people.”
“Okay.”
“You are all sitting at a round table. A man comes in and places a black box in the center of the table. He says that there is ten thousand dollars in it. He shuts off the lights, and it’s now pitch black in the room. You reach for the box and remove the ten thousand dollars and place it in your jacket pocket. Five minutes later, the lights come on and a couple of people walk in. They open the box and the money is gone. They ask who took the money and everyone denies it including you. They lift fingerprints off the box and proceed to take fingerprints of the five people seated around the table. But because you all have the same set of fingerprints, they can’t prove anything. It’s the same concept with the shared account.”
“Yeah but they could search me.” Shut up Chris, he says to himself. He is going down his old path. Play the game. He needs to keep reminding myself.
“I know but you get the idea.”
“Yeah, I got it.” Chris knows that the first person to take the ten thousand dollars is Paul.
“Right, if something goes sour and they tie it to an account which five people share there’s not much they can do if everyone denies any wrong doing.”
Chris begins to find the situation at Biokinz intriguing. He wonders how many “Pauls” are out there. Or for that matter how many Biokinzs. But it’s not just a Paul or a Biokinz thing. It’s an unspoken language that only seasoned suits know. Chris imagines quite a few suits and skirts in the industry who are being unethical and playing the game. The public is only exposed to the high profile corporations, such as Enron, that are worth billions and were caught performing unethical practices. How many companies are actually out there, though, with only a couple of hundred employees th
at are not worth billions that also foster a dishonest environment? Chris believes that a number of them must be going under the radar.
He continues gaining more insight on how things work at Biokinz. The closer a person is exposed to upper management, the more stock they receive and hence, the price of honesty becomes a lot more expensive. It’s similar to the President of the United States. Once a person gets to the top, they are so buttered up that they can’t hang onto any morals. They’ve been exposed to so many cushy things in life that they want more and want their buddies to benefit as well—all at the cost of the public. There’s not much difference between the lack of ethics of the president of a country and a CEO.
As Chris moves up the ladder, he becomes more seasoned in distorting the truth or as Biokinz calls it—framing. To his surprise, he’s exceptionally good at it. If you are going to learn anything, you might as well learn from the best.
“Do you really think the government wants us to fail?” Think about how much money they lose if a corporation fails. All that money that’s supposed to go towards taxes is gone. Think about unemployment once a corporation fails. These are politicians that need to be elected and re-elected. So if unemployment is up and revenue is down that means the government is not doing well,” Paul says emphatically.
“Yeah, makes sense.”
“They are just as dishonest as we are and probably even more. They get all these kickbacks from corporations so they walk a very thin line. It’s similar to the cartel. The cartel has billions of dollars and, as you see, they have police, government officials, military, etc… on their payroll. This is exactly what corporations and governments do. They work hand and hand and cut deals behind closed doors.”
“Yeah I know,” Chris replies.
“It’s capitalism, and it can’t be stopped. Look at all the countries we sucked into this thing. We are too big too fail. If we go down, it’ll have a huge negative effect on the world economy. The government gets our money from corporate taxes and individual taxes. So they don’t want to take down a corporation. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot. In addition, who would the US rather have making a drug? Some company in France or some company in South San Francisco? They aren’t going to get any money from a company in France. Would you rather have a US corporation tracking your web activity or a Chinese corporation?”
“You’re right,” Chris replies, becoming more intrigued.
“Good. You don’t think senators and congressmen are in with the CEO’s do you? You’re an idiot if you don’t think so. These guys make millions off insider trading. Millions.”
As time goes on, Chris and his crew are enjoying this new scenario. He discloses everything to his crew that he and upper management discuss. Well almost everything. Chris’s team knows that he’s now playing the game. He also mentions to Charles, who is one of his direct reports, that he’s learning a bit about framing. Chris senses some disappointment from him when he says this and continues by saying that this is how things are being handled now. He also mentions, however, that he will not ask anyone else to do anything unethical. In the back of his mind, Chris knows he’s going to be the one doing unethical things.
It’s the highest up in the chain that he’s ever been before, and he discovers that framing is a required skill. At this level, people are working with external vendors and auditors, along with more interaction taking place between the different departments. Being able to turn bad news into good news is important. No one wants to hear derogatory news in the corporate world. There’s just too much money at stake.
By now, Chris is deceiving internal employees. Don’t be mistaken; he does it in a professional way. He also keeps Paul in the loop as he senses that Paul wants reassurance that his framing ability is improving but, more importantly, that he does not veer off the path.
About three months after making the decision to join the upper clan, a SOX-related audit is conducted by the Ernst and Young firm. Companies are required to have several controls on their financial systems to help audit changes to these financial environments. These types of controls are to prevent malicious behavior that would help skew finance numbers. But what if it’s a concerted effort between IT and Finance? They claim that segregation of duties is essential, but what if both departments are working together to achieve the same goal? At Biokinz, IT reports to Finance, which is already a bit confusing. But also working in their favor is the fact that the IT Director and the CFO were friends prior to working at the company. With sharing accounts and disabling audit trails, it becomes more difficult to detect fraud. Yet detecting fraud in the corporation is one of the primary purposes of a SOX audit.
There are several checks that auditors perform. Several revolve around SOP’s. SOP’s are “Standard Operating Procedures” that companies write. They detail the processes that must be followed by employees when working on systems. Each department has its own set of SOP’s. They need to confirm that a company is following them. For example: if Joe Smith has access to Oracle Financials, then the auditor will ask to see paperwork showing proper approvals that Joe Smith has been granted this type of access. The company then provides a signed form to the auditor showing approval. This form is tied to the SOP that handles access requests to Oracle Financials. Forms are scanned so that they can be quickly retrieved for audits.
There are thousands upon thousands of corporations that must adhere to SOX and all of them have their differences. There are also many controls that auditors must check which takes time. With the workload on auditors, they are extremely busy working with multiple clients, and depending on the size of the company, some take longer than others. So the pressure and complexity of an audit coupled with management framing situations whenever necessary, it’s difficult to get dinged on something major. The odds are in the corporation’s favor. In the pharmaceutical world, when applying for drug approval, the FDA also conducts audits, but it revolves around systems related to the drug. They are under more pressure than the financial auditors. They can make or break a company. But with everyone playing the game, the advantage is again on the side of the corporation. As Paul alluded to earlier, does anyone really want to see corporations fail in the United States?
One can equate this to sports. If football, for example, suspended all of the players that take illegal substances, there would probably not be many players left. Or, for that matter, if the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) punished the players who violated some sort of rule, the top colleges would not be allowed to participate in any of the Bowl games. This is just at the domestic level; the stakes at the international level are even higher.
So for Biokinz’s yearly financial audit, Chris takes the lead. The Security SOP is one of the auditor’s first requests. He prints a copy from the company internal website and gives it to them. They ask if any changes have been made to the SOP since the last audit. He tells them no. It’s part of the routine. They want to see if the company has made any changes to an SOP and, if so, how significant they are. Changes to SOP’s are also tracked by the Quality Assurance (QA) department. Any change made to an SOP also needs to go through an approval process.
My Turn - Achieving the American Dream Page 5