Professional Workplace Dilemma

This paper will analyze a professional dilemma and values conflict that I’ve experienced during my program of studies at the University of Phoenix. This was happened about one month ago. I am working as a senior tax consultant for a tax relief company which is a division of Freedom Financial Network. We help tax payers to handle and reduce their tax debt with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). We have about 10 sales people in the team, and this is a sales environment and each senior tax consultant will receive leads from the management everyday. After our busiest month April, our leads volume started to decrease and all of us were not doing too well in May and June. During the end of May, one of our senior tax consultants “Roy” was starting to talk about finding his own leads through advertising on newspapers. At first, I thought that was a pretty good idea because we don’t have to rely 100% from the company on marketing. After about one week, he has shown me a website which he created, and the website is another tax relief company that he is trying to form. I was kind of surprise that he showed me that at work. He told me creating our own company can make double of what we’re making by doing the same thing. Two days later, Roy told me there are two other tax consultant is participating, one of the two is our team leader.

There was a different in power and authority because our team leader is involved. All of us were interviewed by him before we got hired but now he is involved in this unethical activity at work. At that point, I was too sure how far our team leader has involved, but Roy sounds like that he already had everything setup like business license, web site, toll-free number, and marketing. In my point of view, I totally understand why they need to do that because they all have a family to feed. On the other hand, I think this is conflict of interest to our current company. The potential outcome was if the company finds out, all of them will be fired and they might have difficulties to find their next job. Another possible outcome was they quit at the same time and we lost couple good sales person. The potential consequences to me were the company thinks that I am also participating into this activity or I will get in trouble because I didn’t report it to the management.

After about one week, our tax sales department received an email from Roy that he is leaving the company. I talked to him and he said he didn’t like the company and he said he shouldn’t talk about the company that he created at work. The other two people that involved are still working now and nothing has happened to them. I believe they didn’t participate and work for Roy’s company. I was just a listener in this case so I wish the management do not suspect me that I’m also involved too. I think I will handle it the same way which is quiet first and take action. I would probably report to the management if they’re actually calling their own clients or stealing leads from our company.




References
Williams Institute for Ethics and Management (2003). Ethics Awareness Inventory. Retrieved July 17, 2008, from University of Phoenix, Resource, GEN/480, Interdisciplinary Capstone Course Web link: http://ecampus.phoenix.edu/secure/aapd/eai/0-eai-title.asp