CASE: DEVIANCE AT RKGA LLP

Rick Berry slouched over his desk in the audit room at Videonics, his largest year-end client. Busy season was always tough, but this year it seemed even tougher. Since being promoted to senior manager a year and a half ago, Rick felt like he was being even more heavily scrutinized by his partners—including Joe Trumbell, his mentor and long-time friend. While Joe and other partners remained generally complimentary of Rick’s work, they seemed particularly teed up over the work behavior of several staff members of the firm—including some who were on multiple jobs with Rick. When Joe approached Rick and told him that Rick’s proximity to the staffers involved made him the perfect guy to investigate this matter further, Rick accepted the assignment. That was four months ago.
The clock on the wall behind him ticked closer to 11:00 p.m. and the faint hum of a vacuum cleaner could be heard down the hall. Rick really wished Joe had asked someone else to shoulder this burden but, unfortunately, he had not—and Rick knew he had a meeting with Joe tomorrow morning to update him on some of his work. He glanced at his notes, and rehashed conversations with firm members and clients during that period: a staffer with a penchant for surfing the web; another who appeared to somewhat regularly ‘‘disappear’’ for brief periods of time during the workday; two others who submitted reimbursement reports with personal, non-work-related receipts; a client who mentioned to a partner that she had an ‘‘inappropriate’’ conversation with a senior staffer at RKGA pertaining to the staffer’s dissatisfaction with his job at the firm. What was happening at RKGA?
Rick looked over at the stack of work papers piled on the desk chair next to him. Don’t I have enough to do without worrying about this stuff? he thought to himself. But as he fixed his gaze back on the notepad