Question

What is the difference between law and ethics? Over 20% of today's large companies have found it a good business practice to hire ethics officers to provide input regarding company policies and decision making. Why is this good business?

Answer 1

Answer- Ethics refers to the moral behaviour or standards set by the society which they consider deem fit or accepted in the society. Generally ethics differ from society to society and hence refers to the behavioural norms that are considered good or bad. On the other hand law refers to the rules and regulations that a legal insititution has set and binds every person of the respective land and hence forth every person whonis binded by such law follows it. If a person goes againstbthe law then such person may be penalised but this is not in the case of ethics.

An ethics officer serves a major role where he/she analyses the non compliance of rules by people, resolves their conflicts, helps in better governance of the company etc. Due to many accounting frauds and disputes between the people in the company the need for an ethic manager was there.

An ethics manager is important because itbhelps the company in analysing the impact of bad decision making or conflicts or even some loss that abcompany may incur due to poor management or governance. Following are some roles of an ethics manager-

• He/She has the job to overlook any non governance in the company and let wvery employee know about the company’s code of conducts and the norma that every employee and other person working in/for the company must follow.

• Such manager is responsible for organising training sessions for the employees where they can resolve their queries and understand better about the ethical policies.

• After making everyone understand about the ethics his role is also to monitor and oversee the work and governance in the company and to further initiate plans to control any non adherence to the ethics.

• It also helps the organisation in maintaining the internal controls and thus it helps to improve the efficiency of the organisation.

Thus, for every organisation it seems to be important to have a ethics manager to have a control over activities and better implimentation of activities.