When is certification NOT a good idea? When the body doing the certifying owns the company being certified but doesn’t disclose this. Can you say “conflict of interest?”

“Tested Green” Environmental Certifications were neither tested, nor green.  The Washington, D.C. based company was apparently running a pay-for-certifications program and improperly stating that independent associations endorsed the certifications (the “independent associations” and Tested Green were all owned by the same person).

Ironically, the page where I first found this was trying to sell people on a high-priced and kind of dicey-looking conference about certification fraud. I had to dig around on Google until I found a link I felt comfortable sharing.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

Breaking news: Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for his $50 billion fraud/Ponzi scheme.

Proving, yet again, that crime really doesn’t pay. He may have lived high on the hog, but he’ll spend the rest of his life and rather less comfortable circumstances. My heart goes out to all those scammed by him, and especially the many philanthropy and social change organizations that invested with him, whose missions are substantially compromised by Madoff’s evil deeds.

Want a better way? My award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, shows how to thrive and succeed as an ethical business. The Ponzi stuff never works in the long term–but my strategies do.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

Yesterday’s edition of Christopher Baauer’s Weekly Ethics Thought newsletter bore a startling statistic:

43.8% of the surveyed companies said they would not refer uncovered fraud to law enforcement due to fears of bad publicity.

Wow! So these companies are potentially throwing away millions of dollars because they’re too ashamed of the bad press they’d receive.
Like Bauer, I say avoid the problem in the first place by having strong ethics programs in place from the get-go.

Of course, in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I make the case that strong ethics can actually be a profit center–but we’ll cut the bean-counters some slack and demonstrate that at least a culture of ethics has significant cost-control advantages.

His article isn’t on the Web, but here’s a link to Bauer’s site.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail