Background
Rachel works as an investment adviser and manager for Outrageous Wealth Managers, which she joined last year, having worked for a number of years for the wealth management subsidiary of Azure, a major UK bank.
One day, as she returns from visiting clients at their home in the country, she boards the train and sees sitting at a table Bruce, with whom she used to work and who still works for Azure. Bruce is engaged in reading what look like business related papers but Rachel says hello and sits down opposite him.
Rachel asks Bruce how he is getting on at Azure, which she hears is undergoing a periodic reorganisation and he responds gloomily that life is not getting any easier. He is only on this train because he has been to see his doctor who says that he is suffering from stress.
Rachel sympathises with him, adding that she will not disturb him from his work and she begins to read a magazine. Meanwhile Bruce continues reading his papers, occasionally apparently signing what Rachel takes to be letters to clients. After a while, the train slows, and Bruce begins to gather his papers, which he places in two piles. One pile he gathers up and puts in his brief case. The other pile, which seems to have hand writing on, he tears in half and puts under his empty coffee cup.
The train pulls into the station and Bruce quickly says goodbye to Rachel and hurries off, putting his cup in the bin as he does so. As Rachel gets up and puts on her coat she notices the Azure Bank logo on the papers that Bruce pushed into the bin and she wonders to herself whether she should retrieve them.
The dilemma
Rachel tries to rationalise this thought by saying to herself that she will see that the papers are more securely disposed of since they may be confidential and although she no longer works for Azure, she would not like Bruce to get into trouble.
Rachel takes the papers out of the bin and although they have been torn in half and one edge is damp, she can see quite clearly that they are draft letters to Azure customers and contain their contact and detailed financial and investment information.
At this point Rachel, who had picked up the papers apparently with the best of intentions, finds her mind racing. These papers could be extremely valuable to her in providing an entrée into valuable new clients and without any great effort on her part. Bruce must really be under stress if he can be so careless, she thinks. But she wonders whether it would really be fair to Bruce if he was suddenly to lose all his best clients. Rachel and he were never more than fellow advisers at Azure, but even so, she would not like it if the boot was on the other foot.
Nevertheless, Rachel dries off the papers, puts them in her briefcase and returns to the office where she types out a report on her customer visit. But even as she does so the question of the Azure papers plays on her mind and she decides to discuss the matter with Simon a fellow manager, with whom she gets on well.
She tells Simon what happened on her train journey saying that she considers there to be four options for dealing with the letters, which she retrieved.
She says to Simon that her initial thought is simply to shred the papers, since that way she will not be tempted to do anything with them and no one will be any the wiser, although clearly Bruce is entirely unaware of what he has done.
On the other hand, she could send the papers back to Bruce saying that she had perhaps saved him from some embarrassment if someone else had found them, which might cause him to think a bit harder about what he does.
If she sends the letters to Azure compliance, they will no doubt conduct an investigation and Bruce might get into trouble, possibly even lose his job, which she certainly does not want.
But why should she not use the information that she has found?
Simon says that he quite understands Rachel’s dilemma, which has the added personal dimension that because she worked with Bruce, she does not want any action that she might take to rebound on him. He then asks Rachel if she would worry less if the person who had abandoned the papers had been a stranger and she says that it would make life a bit simpler but does not resolve her principle dilemma, which is whether she should actually make use of the information.
Simon and Rachel debate this issue for some time saying that a useful yardstick would be to consider how they would feel if the boot was on the other foot. If they had “lost” some client information, which was found by a competitor, would they expect it to be returned, or would they assume that the finder would try to use it; and what would be their reaction if they did.
Rachel continued to feel that shredding the papers was the right course of action and is dismayed that Simon argues that since the papers had been abandoned and they had done nothing dishonest in obtaining them, then there was absolutely no reason why Rachel should not make use of them. He even suggests that if Rachel does not intend to use them, she should give them to him!
At the team meeting next Monday, Rachel recounted what had occurred on the train and her struggle to decide what to do with the papers that she had retrieved from the bin, adding that she had discussed the matter with Simon but that they had been unable to come to a conclusion. Matthew, the partner, said that this represented an interesting dilemma and that he would be interested to hear the views of the other 6 team members and perhaps they should spend a few minutes discussing it about it.
Matthew allows the team a few minutes to consider the matter giving them four possible courses of action:
- Return the papers to Azure compliance.
- Return the papers to Bruce at Azure
- Shred the papers and any copies that have been made
- Keep the papers and make use of them.
Verdict
The most ethical course of action would be to shred the papers and to let Bruce alone know what you have done, so that he is aware of the potential ramifications of his carelessness without the risk of causing harm to either you or him.
Further reading