Group 2 – FB0605
Nguyễn Thị Thu Hà – FB00444 Dư Đức Tùng – FB00410 Phan Ngọc Mẫn – FB00422
Ngô Băng Linh – FB00353

Travel expenses:
A chance for extra income

1. Case summary: 2 2. Ethical issues 2 3. Analysis: 3 a) Ethics theories: Utilitarianism and Deontology 3 b) Apply in the case: 4 4. Solutions: 5

1. Case summary:
Nowadays, every company always support for employees to improve working efficiency by paying for traveling and entertaining expenses. However, from that reasonable policy, there are many faults which happen by employees who always try to maximize their expenses reached to the company’s limitation. These expenses even include many things which don't relevant to employees themselves and irrationality such as: * One employee submitted a bill for $12 for a tin of cookies * $625 for wallpapering included in her travel expenses and even had the receipt written in foreign language in order to throw off any questions * $275 sports jacket submitted as a restaurant bill.
If one employee adds $1 in his/ her bill, it may not affect a lot but let's imagine that every employees in company do that times by times, what's happen and what consequences does company have to face up with?

2. Ethical issues
Firstly, in the aspect of personal integrity, employees in the case violated some rules relate to the necessary integrity for matures. Confront to these situations, an honest adult will need to carefully consider in order keeping them away from the faults. Pressure and attraction from “extra income” can be a strong motivation leading to the thoughts and decisions differ to their conscience. They ignore thinking what is right, and just act accordingly. In the case situation, these employees always aware of the fraud of cheating expense, but they still deceive themselves and defense based on the fact that everyone around them act like that and it harms no one.
The second ethical side of this story is about responsibility with the organization. Each employee, whenever decide to engage to a company, always imply their agreements about their position, integrity, power and responsibility which will follow them during the working period. The frauds somehow will create a bad precedent. Whenever they had the first time, the second or the third will come enviably and the unavoidable consequences can be the degradation of ethic. In another side, bad behaviors of an individual, if become popular, can be a dangerous threat to the corporate culture. In this direction, personal failures lead to corporate failures and affect the whole business.

3. Analysis: a) Ethics theories: Utilitarianism and Deontology * Utilitarianism:
+ Utilitarianism is when you make decisions based on ethical consequences. In details, when having alternatives to consider, you will choice the one which produce best consequences for all parties affected by the decisions.
+ Best consequences: promote human – being: the happiness, health, dignity, freedom, integrity… * Decisions that accomplish this goal are the right decision to make ethically; those that do not are ethically wrong.
+ Ways to achieve maximum overall happiness:
+) Profit – maximization perspective
+) Public policies perspective: turns to policy experts who can predict the outcome of various policies => carry out policies that will achieve utilitarian ends.
+ Challenges to utilitarian ethics: +) Comparing and measuring the consequences of alternative actions is very difficult. +) Do the ends justifies the means? * Deontology sometimes described as "duty" or "obligation" or "rule"-based ethics. In the other words, deontology is one of those kinds of normative theories regarding which choices are morally required, forbidden, or permitted. A man with deontological ethics will always make decisions or carry out his actions due to the defined rules base on his role in each typical situation/environment. People, regularly think about the results when considering actions, but some decisions should be matters of principle, not consequences - the ends do not always justify the means.
+ The key thing of Deontological ethic is about principles. These principles can originate from many sources, mainly belong to social contract, which functions to organize and ease relations between individuals. b) Apply in the case: According to utilitarianism theory, ethical decision is which maximize the happiness as well as satisfaction for as many people as possible. In the case of increasing traveling and entertaining expense irrationally, the benefit brought only for the employee who will be reimbursed. As mentioned above, if there are many employees do like that, company will have to pay much for unnecessary activities. This also effects on other expenses and profits for overall employees. Therefore, increasing traveling and entertaining expense opposes the theory of utilitarian.
Based on the knowledge of Deontology, combined with facts given in the case, the ethical issue is violation in principles and duties of a mature and a staff of company. There’re 2 types of social contract in this case. The employees, overall, are the mature ones who fully aware about which are right or wrong. Thus, the behavior of embezzlement traveling expenses, like improper expenditures, fake the bills to exploit, obviously is not suitable with the basic rules of the integrity. In the role of the company staff, besides the trained regulations, the staffs are always required to respect the benefit of their company, rather than anything else, in any business cases. Deciding to cheat by something like traveling expenses, they had put the personal benefits higher than the corporation, this can be seen as a violation of their engaged agreements.
To sum up, a man with deontological ethics tend to appreciate the role they play in each specific situation, a staff in company, a member in family, or a friend, and acts due to the sustainable rules of each. The employees who decide to gain something from their company, in travel, can’t be seen as a deontological person, or a duty-man. 4. Solutions:
With the ethical problem above, we suggest some solutions to deal with as following: * To reduce the limitation for expense in order to make employees feel there is no worth to add only $1 or $2 in their accounts. * To co-operate with third - party company which provides traveling and entertaining services for your employees. This alliance will help you to check the bills as well as design some typical services for your employees which can manage expenses well. * To hold some entertaining activities within company such as team building to reduce uncontrolled expenses as well as strengthening relationships. * To build and concentrate on company culture. When you have a strong company culture, your employees will fell that they are members in a family and be responsible for that company.
Solutions applied in one company depends lots of things such as company’s culture, policies and working environment. Therefore, the managers need to consider carefully before implementing solutions for such an essential problem such as travelling and entertaining expenses.