Steve Priest (steve@integrityII.com) is President of Integrity Insight International.
Around the same time the US Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations were enacted in response to pervasive wrongdoing by corporations, 23% of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in big business. By 1999, just before the major scandals that led to Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, this trust increased to 30%. This year it is 23%.[1] The public doesn’t trust the corporations most of us work for any more now than they did at the dawn of our profession. (I started my first business ethics consulting firm in 1993, and we had close to zero competitors.)