Business Ethics
While being legal, facilitating payments are still considered to be questionable from the point of view of business ethics. The following arguments have been made:
- Unfair competition: smaller business have fewer opportunities and less financial possibilities to "grease" foreign officials.
- sustaining questionable business practices.
- dependence on irregular payments creates additional risk and hence discourages investment
Many companies therefore restrict or severely limit making facilitating payments in their policies, however this practice is not yet widespread. For example, as of 2006, in Australia, among the S&P ASX 100 only 24 companies control facilitating payments and only 15 are reported to prohibit them.
Read more about this topic: Facilitating Payment
Famous quotes containing the words business and/or ethics:
“There is something in this native land business and you cannot get away from it, in peace time you do not seem to notice it much particularly when you live in foreign parts but when there is a war and you are all alone and completely cut off from knowing about your country well then there it is, your native land is your native land, it certainly is.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“If you take away ideology, you are left with a case by case ethics which in practise ends up as me first, me only, and in rampant greed.”
—Richard Nelson (b. 1950)