Ethics & Integrity at Workplace | NISSMAT

Hello friends, this is C. Paul Singh, President, NISSMAT International. I thank you all for joining us at the 128th edition of our international webinar on Ethics and Integrity at Workplace. I extend a very warm and hearty welcome to our two learned speakers from USA. I'm sure the delegates would find the deliberations quite useful and will enjoy the deliberations.

Let me say a few words about NISSMAT as such. National Institute of Security, Safety, Management and Applied Technology was established about three decades back in 1990. We started having courses and training on private security, followed by some courses for the defense, ex-defense forces personnel, for their second career in the private security industry. For the last few years we started expanding ourselves and we have now thought of having NISSMAT International in four segments. First is NISSMAT Forum, to organize webinars, seminars, conferences, international meets, programs, debates, etc. — that is NISSMAT Forum. The second is NISSMAT Academy, to conduct virtual training programs and assessments. The third is NISSMAT Enterprise, to undertake audits and verification and also to establish international alliances. And the last is NISSMAT Foundation, to undertake welfare and social work for the society at large.

With these words I now like to introduce the chairman. A few words about Captain — on Mr. Bonjour — that earlier took voluntary retirement from the Parachute Regiment of the Indian Army at a very young age and plunged into an unknown area of business. His warmth, as all of us know who have been associated with him, is really contagious, and he has an internal sense to find out silver lining in every situation. Persons of impeccable manner and style, he has a courage of conviction and has created a great group under the name of Aluwalia Holding Private Limitation, which has offices at multiple locations in India and abroad. With this continuous perseverance he has grown, elevated and achieved a position of prominence in the business world. He is the past president and formal chairman of the Council of International Investigation, USA, and is an awardee of Malcolm Thompson award and Kotalia award. Shri Pavanji Telewalya will moderate the session.

After a few minutes, let me introduce the subjects. The subject of today's webinar, Ethics and Integrity at Workplace, is indeed very important for all organizations. Ethics as such are considered as moral principles which govern the behavior of an employee in an organization. These ethics and these principles are at times codified, and the organization lays down a code of ethics. Many organizations have this code of ethics which the members of the organization or employees of the organization are bound to follow. While integrity as such is focused on the personal characteristics of an individual, integrity in fact is an act of behaving yourself in a manner so as to be honest and honorable. The integrity can mean that even when others are not watching you, you are doing the right thing, you are doing the honest thing. That is the integrity.

The workplace, in fact, is essential and is considered an important element in every field. Particularly I like to refer, because there are two investigators with us, in the field of investigation, private investigation, honesty, fairness and integrity are important for all investigation work. Taking improper shortcuts or misrepresenting facts are against integrity. In any private investigation, an investigator is actually required to exhibit a strong moral principle, always and consistently, so that he is able to deliver things in the right and earnest manner.

But honesty — now sometimes we have a plea, an alibi, not to follow the principle of honesty or integrity. Then we sometimes say that everybody else is doing this, so am I doing. Or you may say that I did not have any other choice, but I had to do this thing. Or you may say, I didn't know that exact legal position was like that, so I had to do it. I have been always doing it, so I did. Even if you have been doing earlier, that doesn't mean that you should continue to be dishonest and just have no integrity. So you can always deviate, and there is always an ethical choice, and a private investigator should select this choice.

High degree of integrity in any workplace actually activates the workplace and also makes it much more profitable. The employees should have a sort of natural tendency of this integrity and ethical attitude. How to develop the integrity — it is for the employer also to consider. He should convey the impression to his employees that all the employees are able to realize what is integrity, and they should follow integrity. He should convey very often about it, and he should ensure that it impacts their profession and personal career, ultimately by ensuring that integrity gets reciprocated to them in the form of their appreciation, for encouragement. You can always develop integrity by following some of these points. The level of integrity in a workplace shall rise, and it will give you much more profitability. With these words, I will now pass on the session to Mr. Pavanjit to carry on the proceedings further. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Sipal. Before I start, I'd like to acknowledge the presence of participants from India, Singapore, USA, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Guyana, Monaco, Netherlands, UAE, United Kingdom and Vietnam. We are, as I speak, streaming live on YouTube and Zoom. And I'd also like to acknowledge the sponsors of the event, without whom we may not be able to exist. One is Premiershield Private Limited, and we are supported by Premier Consulting and Investigations Limited, India Skills Private Limited, Tag Scores, JMD Cargo and Hubspot.

A word about our president. Mr. Sipal Singh is one of the most illustrious and decorated police officers of our country. He raised the Rapid Action Force as part of the Indian Police Services, and he was appointed as the first chief of this elite force. He later raised the Internal Security Academy, a central police academy in the state of Rajasthan of India. During his service he was decorated with the President's Police Medal for Distinguished Services, the Indian Police Medal for Meritorious Services, the Police Special Duty Medal with bar, a Sena Medal, and a number of other commendations and rewards. Post retirement he worked in the private sector with Tata's Iron and Steel Company and was assigned the responsibility to streamline the security and vigilance matters in the coalfield division of TISCO, to prevent losses to this division. He has also been the chairman of the technical committee of Quality Control of India, which formulated the standards for star rating of private security companies. He was involved in developing the curriculum for private security guards training under the Security Sector and Skills Development Council. He was the head of the committee which designed and worked out national occupation standards for training of private security guards and qualification pack, and national occupation standards for the firefighters. He was awarded the Security Personality of the Year award by the President of India in the year 2009. He is an advisor to the Asian Professional Security Association, the Indian chapter, and an honorary director general to the centralization of private security industries in India. Mr. Sipal Singh's face is well known in India as a dynamic security professional, and he is frequently called to share his views on various subjects connected to homeland security on national news channels.

Our first speaker of the day is Kitty Haley. Kitty Haley is an investigator of long standing. In her almost 50 years in the profession, she has owned and operated a large agency both in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the United States. She has also worked with a small team performing criminal defense and civil rights work for the last decade. Kitty is the author of over 50 articles for professional journals. She has spoken at educational conferences and written numerous books to enhance the profession. Her most recognized writing is Code of Professional Conduct: Standards and Ethics for the Investigative Profession, now in its third edition. This is the seminal writing on ethics for investigators worldwide. Please feel free to contact her via website if you have any questions or inquiries at a later point of time. You can take the website and her personal address from me at any point of time. After all this time, her joy comes in helping others to become the best in their field and sharing her knowledge with the next generation of investigators. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Kitty Haley.

Well, I would say good morning, because it's very early here on the east coast of the United States, but I understand that it is not the same for many of you out there. So hello, wherever you are, and it's a pleasure and an honor to be a part of this presentation. The brief and pretty accurate biography of me that my friend Pawan has offered basically just says that I am old and I have been in this business for a very, very long time. Obviously I did not have a profession prior to this — if I had, I would be in my hundreds, but I'm not. I started in this business in my 20s, and I found, as one of the few women who were involved in investigation, because that's my primary work, that there was much to be learned and much to do to take the profession into the world of professionalism.

When investigators in my early generation, where we first started, when we told people what we did, we were looked down upon. We were considered less than moral, less than ethical, less than professional. And it's been my lifetime job that I have self-imposed upon me to bring the profession into the highest level of profession as possible, because I believe that those of us in safety and security and investigation leave a legacy for the world that is very important, and that we have something of a responsibility, more than anyone else in any other profession except law enforcement and government, of protecting people. We assist, we protect, we find information that allows a quality of life to continue.

Now here's the problem. Because we do that, we also have the ability to cause harm — to reputations, to persons. The information we provide might hurt someone. And ultimately I was appalled at that thought, and so I wrote a book of ethics almost 20 years ago. That was something I wanted to aspire to. I put the highest level of action that a professional investigator could do together in one little volume, and I found that it was pretty much accepted across the profession and across other professions. Real estate agents have codes of ethics, plumbers have codes of ethics, security people have codes of ethics. And what they do is provide a platform of something that we can hold up to the world and say: we do not have to be regulated, we are regulating ourselves. And I think that's the most important part.

In the United States there was a time that we were threatened as investigators, and it continues, that we will be subjected to regulations by our government. And yet if they put stops and limits on what we can do, we cannot do our job. We cannot help people if we cannot get information. Information is our key and our tool. So this understanding of ethics helps us to keep the information we obtain proper and correct, and to do it right. And so we have a burden of responsibility which is common across all countries, whether it's the United States or India or Bangladesh, and that is the responsibility to act in an ethical manner. In security professions, our goal is to do no harm.

And so we've got to start with some definitions that we agree upon. And so for the purposes of my introduction today of the topic of ethics, I'm going to use my own description — and it's pretty much accepted, but it is my own description — and that is: ethics are agreed-upon codes of conduct that a group has agreed should govern. So the efforts of one group might be different from another, but they are agreed upon. Most organizations have ethics. Steve Kirby's CII group, Council of International Investigators, has a code of ethics. The National Association of Legal Investigators has a code of ethics. NISSMAT has a code of ethics. There are ways of acting that everyone agrees should be maintained by everyone in the profession, in that association. There, the only possible penalty would be expulsion from the group for not living up to those possible codes of ethics. Doctors have ethics, lawyers have ethics. They differ within industry, but primarily they are the same. So understanding that these are ways of conducting ourselves that we all agree upon — that would be ethics.

Now there's another side to ethics, and that's morality, or morals. They can be used interchangeably, but for the purposes of today I'm going to suggest that morality is not the ethic of the group, but is the ethic of the person. We all have our own personal codes of conduct. They're brought to us from our parents, they're brought to us from our environment, from the people who have influenced us as we have grown up. And so morality tends to be that which we think of as the individual. It applies to our individual manners of treating people, our individual concepts of sex — I mean, I think most people think of sex when they think morality — and it's whether we conduct ourselves in a personal way that lives up to our own personal standards.

And then there's a third area that we have to consider, and that's the law. And the law is an established code of conduct that is imposed on us. Each country has its own laws, each regime has its own laws, and within each country or each regime we may not all agree with those laws, but we are governed by them. And so the difference between ethics and law is that ethics in an organization is that which we all agree upon; in law, these are ways of acting that we might not agree upon. However, they all do the same thing — they all act as traffic signals. We're all familiar with traffic lights at intersections, and they're there for a reason, so that the cars going north and south don't bang into the cars going east and west, because there are stops and limits to what we can do. And that basically is what ethics is: it's the traffic light that conducts our ability to go or not to go. And of course, sometimes if it's on yellow we sneak through, and that's where our individual morality comes in — how far will we go to accomplish our goals?

Now, in talking about investigators and security persons, I found that there are four areas of ethics that best encapsulate all of ethics that we deal with. The first being that we have a duty of responsibility to our entire profession, whatever that profession might be. And it's a simple duty. If there is licensing required by the state or by the country or the area in which we live and work, then we must have licensing. If that means we must pass a test or pay for the licensing, we have to do that. That's a basic need — to make sure that we are properly licensed so that we can function within our area. I don't know what it is in other countries, but in the United States we are licensed in each of the individual states, and so I am licensed in two states, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They abut each other, so I can cross a border and not worry about working. If I'm on surveillance and someone goes over a bridge, I can go over that bridge and work. But if I want to work in the state of Florida, I have to work under someone else's license. I can't just set up a shop and decide I want to be an investigator. What that does is it protects us all under the law, so that we are governed and we can't be rogue and just go into business and not have the proper licensing.

And we suffer, because television and mass communication has made what we do a very sexy business. And yet when I think of the day-to-day work that I do, there could be nothing that is less sexy. I deal with criminals, I deal with post-conviction, and I deal with civil rights cases. They are hard, they are difficult. They deal with murder, they deal with maiming, they deal with imprisonment. There is nothing that is elaborate about that, that should be praised or lauded. It should be worked that hard. And when I see some of the mass media television programs that are available, I am somewhat appalled that people think that it's an exciting job that they can do in a half an hour with two commercials. It doesn't work that way.

So as a professional, and maintaining the highest integrity of the profession, we have to maintain the highest standards by abiding by the law, by stopping at those stop signs, and by cooperating with law enforcement. Because sometimes the work that we do as security persons and as investigators comes into clashing with law enforcement. We might be investigating something that they are investigating, and because we work under the laws of our country first, then we must abide by the laws that govern them and not interfere with anything that is being done by law enforcement. So that's the first area — maintaining the highest level of professionalism.

The second is professional client relations. How do we interact with our clients? Whether you're an investigator or a security person, how do you interact with the people you work with? And you do it first with honesty. You tell them upfront what you can do for them. You do not exaggerate, you do not lie. You take their plight or their problems seriously, and you do it to the best of your ability. You do it with confidence. You establish the scope of employment before you get started. You need to know what is expected of you, what your client wishes you to do in exchange for money, and you have to be clear and honest about what that fee is going to be. We cannot establish a price fixing. We cannot say everyone must charge the same, or this is the standard that we are going to charge, because that would be price fixing. We charge what we charge because that is what we post and that is what we maintain. That can change; it can change from client to client, from job to job, and frequently we do pro bono work. We work for free for something we believe in — too frequently. But everyone cannot afford to pay, and so we do the job that we do.

But we owe the client diligence and competence. It's possible for someone who has never done a criminal investigation to do a criminal investigation, but it behooves them to educate themselves, to work with someone who can assist them, to ask for another investigator's tutelage or mentoring. It's possible to do anything, because investigations are similar. They all work around doing the work that we do by understanding the job, laying out the problem, and doing the investigation. So there is a similarity, but it's a big difference between doing an insurance investigation and a civil rights investigation, because what we need to find is different. And so we have a responsibility not to just take on anything that comes down the pike and say yes, we can do it, without knowing that we have people to rely on to assist us. And so we can seek out other investigators to help.

But what we have to do as we're working on the job is to maintain records, to make sure that we have reporting to our clients, and that reporting has to be honest. Now unfortunately, clients have unusual expectations. They believe that we can do anything, or that we will find what they want. Well, in a good investigation, we find what exists, not what they want. We cannot change a fact, we cannot twist something. Although it's very interesting — in a criminal investigation there are two sides. There is the defense and there is the prosecution. And if a good investigator is hired on each side and they find the facts, the facts will be the same, because the facts don't change. However, when they get into court, the attorney for the prosecution is going to take those facts and twist them this way, and the attorney for the defense is going to take those facts and twist them this way, and you would believe that they were never the same from the beginning. However, we can't make anything up. We have to find what is there, and that's part of the duty of responsibility to our client. No matter what anyone else does with that information, we have to provide it, whether they like it or they don't like it. They have to know what they're looking at.

Now the third area is professional relations. We work with other individuals frequently. Sometimes we have staffs, sometimes we have partners. Whatever the standards are of the person who is licensed to work, that has to be the standards that the people who work with them and under them also maintain. So any employee that I have has to live up to my standards, and that would be my code of conduct. Any person that I would subcontract to has to live up to my standards. I become responsible for them, not only ethically but legally, and that's why I carry insurance. Because you hope that the people who work with you will work in the same manner that you work — although sometimes when someone is out in the field it's not possible to govern them as much as you would like to. But you can teach them, you can train them, you can let them know what your ethical standards are and what you live by, and hope that they continue to do that too.

Also, we have to be careful about the reputation of other investigators. When we malign another investigator, we malign the entire profession. When we talk bad about another investigator, or tell someone that he or she is not as good as I am — I can do the job better because he doesn't know what he's doing, or oh my goodness, I've worked with him, he's terrible, I don't like the way he works — well, you can't do that. You can do it, but you shouldn't do it. You shouldn't do it because it takes the entire profession and lowers it. It takes it into the realm of pettiness, and we as professionals are so far above that. If we do not like someone or what someone has done, I think we have a duty of responsibility to contact them and let them know that they're not doing things the way we would like them to be done, as opposed to badmouthing them — going to a cocktail party after a conference and sitting around and saying he's a terrible investigator, I would not work with him. That could ruin someone's business prospects forever. It could ruin someone's reputation. And we have a duty to be better to our fellow professionals.

Also, we have a specific duty when we subcontract to another professional. We want to be paid by our clients; we have to pay other professionals who work for us in a timely manner, as prescribed and what we promised, and without cutting corners and without making them wait until we are paid. If you hire an investigator, unless you have already said to them, I cannot pay you for three months until I'm paid, you must pay them immediately. We have to do for other investigators what we want done for us. We have a certain responsibility to make sure that all investigators are well compensated for the work that they do.

And the very last thing, the last area that I have chosen as one of my areas of concentration, is relations with the general public. And I've already covered a little bit of it in telling you how I feel about what has happened on television and in movies. When we talk to people, it's nice to brag, and it's nice to boast, and it's nice to elevate ourselves into the sun realm as movie stars. We're not. We're good, hard, honest working people, and we do a good, hard, honest working job. And so when we advertise, it's not about the way we look, it's about what we do. When we advertise, it's about honestly giving what our abilities are, about honestly telling what we can accomplish, about honestly giving our fees and not misrepresenting ourselves, excuse me. And so we owe all people fair and lawful treatment, because again, the object is to do no harm to anyone. That includes witnesses and suspects, subjects of investigation, subjects of interrogation. We owe them all respect. And it comes down simply to treating people the way we would like to be treated, which as we all understand is the golden rule, under many different terms: do unto others as we would like them to do unto us.

So this all comes to: how does this apply in our daily life as a professional? It's very simple. Before we do anything we have to ask ourselves three questions. Is it possible? Is it legal? And is it ethical? Well, in the world of investigation and the world of security, we know anything is possible. If you want to find out where someone lives, you can find out where someone lives. You want to find out how much money they make, you can find that out too. Anything is possible, because we live in a world of advanced technology. And just because it's possible doesn't make it legal. So we need to know what our local laws are, the laws under which we are working — whether just because it's possible we can accomplish this, or whether we should not be doing that. And the third is: is it ethical? Because something might be legal, but in the long run it just might not be.

And so I have put together a couple of scenarios to discuss what I'm talking about when I say let's ask ourselves: is it possible, is it legal, or is it ethical? And one which I'm sure we've all come across in some way or another is the employer who wishes to find out if his employee, who is suing him for a workplace-related injury, if that person is still really injured, because he's been off from work for a very, very long time. I think most of you have come across something of this nature in some way or another, where someone claims to have been injured on the job. They were working in a factory and they had a slip and fall, and they hurt their back, and they claim they cannot walk, they cannot dance, they cannot have any quality of life. And so every time you see them in the public, they're wearing one of those collars that makes it look like they're in great pain. And it's possible that they're only putting that collar on when they leave the house, but we don't know what's going on inside the house, and we have no legal right to look inside the house. So we need to find out other ways of knowing if that person is injured or not.

And so the employer hires you and says, I want you to go on Facebook. I want you to friend this individual and get into her private background. I want to know whether she dances, goes to clubs, sneaks out of the house in a collar but goes to private parties. I want to see the photographs that are on her private Facebook page, not the one she puts out to the public. So I ask you, can this be done? I think we all know that it can. It can definitely be done. So that's the possibility — is it possible? Absolutely, it is possible. You can friend anyone, and strangers will accept you into their Facebook world.

But then the next question is, is it legal? And I have to answer that not with yes or no, but with possibly, because it depends where in the world you are. In many states within the United States it is not legal, because it comes down to something called — well, actually in all states of the United States it's called ex parte contact. Because if that is a person represented by an attorney in a lawsuit, ex parte means not represented, outside of the realm of what is legal, separate and apart. And so I could depose that woman in a formal deposition, but I could not speak with her without her attorney present. And communication is what speech is, and under the attorney's rules of ethics, ex parte contact is not allowed. If I'm working for a lawyer, or I'm working in a world where I am also governed by similar laws, I cannot have communication with that other person. And so even asking to be friended, to be allowed into that world, violates that. I don't know what it is in other countries — it would be interesting to hear what you can and cannot do in a realm such as Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or any one of the other numerous venues where you can find out about people's personal life by just looking. However, in the United States it's not legal to just look.

And would it be ethical to do that? Of course the answer is no, because it would be violating the law. But would it be ethical if I asked my sister, who's not an investigator, for her to friend someone, and she just happens to tell me what she sees, or happens to share the information with me? Think about that for a second. Because in my world the answer is no. If it's not allowed, it's not allowed. Subterfuge is not allowed to find it. And it means that the investigator now has to go into another area of attempting to get information, by perhaps the old tried and true gumshoe tricks of surveillance, or trash picking, or any number of things — talking to neighbors, talking to relatives, but not talking to the person themselves, because that constitutes ex parte contact.

And I think I have time for one more. Am I right? One? Yeah, just a minute left, Kitty. Okay. Well, the last one is that sometimes there is something called situational ethics, when the situation changes and it behooves you to kind of throw your ethics out the window. And that happened to me in a situation where I was asked to use a pretext to see if a child was in a home and was being maintained in a good condition. Father had hired me, and mother was estranged, and they shared custody, and the father was concerned that when the child was in mother's presence that she wasn't being taken care of. And so I used a pretext to deliver a package to the house, and I wasn't going to have conversation. I just wanted to see if the child was there, and get as far as the front door so that I could look and see what the conditions were.

I knocked on the door, and after a long time a young woman came and opened the door. She was disheveled, she was dirty, she actually smelled. I could smell marijuana coming from the inside of the house. It was so overwhelming that I could have gotten a contact high just standing outside on the doorstep. And I was able to look past, and what I saw was a man lying on a sofa with his arm out over the sofa and a needle sticking out of the arm. And I saw the infant, who was about perhaps 10 months old, crawling around on the floor beneath the man on the sofa. Now, my duty of responsibility was for confidentiality. I was there on a pretext. I wasn't supposed to talk to the woman, I wasn't supposed to go inside, I wasn't supposed to have contact with the child. And yet my personal ethics and my personal morals hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm a mom, I'm a grandmom. I saw a baby in distress. I pushed open the door, I walked inside, I picked up the child off the floor. She was dirty, she smelled, her diaper was dirty. Somehow or another, the arm that had been laying on the side with the needle in it disappeared under a blanket. I picked the child up and I said to the mother, I'm here representing your estranged husband. I'm taking the child with me and I'm calling the police. And I walked out the door.

That's a situation where — was it right to violate the confidentiality of my client? Certainly not. Was it right to save a child? Yeah, I think so. So sometimes ethics are situational, and we have to be flexible. And I think that concludes my time. I wish I had more, and I'm more than willing to discuss with you anything you would like at any time. Thank you.

Thank you, Kitty, for a wonderful talk. And now I'd like to sort of introduce the second speaker of the day, Steve Kirby. Steve Kirby is a licensed private investigator from the Chicago, USA area. He is now semi-retired. During the course of an almost 50-year career, Steve has investigated fraud matters and complex litigation throughout many of the 50 United States, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Haiti, Australia, New Zealand and the Bahamas. In addition to fraud matters, Kirby has investigated several high-profile criminal defense cases that have been featured on Netflix, Dateline and 20/20. His work on these criminal defense cases has helped secure the release of six wrongfully convicted persons, including one who was facing the death penalty. In four of those cases, the investigation helped to the identity of the true guilty party. Since his semi-retirement, from 2013 to 2020, Kirby was the executive director of the Council of International Investigators, a well-respected organization of over 400 private investigators and security professionals from around the world. Kirby was also a founding member of the National Council of Investigative and Security Services, a US-based organization dedicated to professionalism of the private investigation field. He has lectured on ethics in front of several organizations and has been published in two well-recorded investigative textbooks. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Steve.

Thank you. I couldn't have written that better myself — oh wait a minute, I did. But just right up front, I want everybody to know that I am not an ethicist, by any stretch of the imagination, and I really haven't ever written about ethics. But as an investigator for almost 50 years, primarily in the early part of my career doing countless fraud investigations, I ran across a lot of fraudsters, and I was curious as to why they would make the decisions that they would make — why they would make the decision to do something dishonest, which invariably got them into more trouble than if they hadn't done it in the first place. And I think when we talk about ethics, I think what we really need to talk about is the choices that we make and the consequences that come from those choices. At least that's the interest that I have.

Both Mr. Singh and Kitty touched on the difference between, and the interaction between, morality, ethics and the law, and really not a whole lot I could add to what they said. I just think that basically ethics is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. You can have a moral code, and if you choose not to make the right decisions with that moral code, and act on your own morality that, like Kitty said, is ingrained in you or taught to you through either religion or through custom or whatever, then it's pointless, and the morality is worthless. Similarly, if you're what we call amoral — you don't know what's right or what's wrong — you really can't be expected necessarily to act in an ethical manner. So again, ethics is really — morality without the right choice is meaningless, but without a sense of morality, an ethical choice is very unlikely.

In regards to the law, as it was explained, law is a codified set of rules by the government, and laws shouldn't define ethics, because legal's not always right. Laws evolve over the years. Slavery was legal in the United States and other places in the world; I don't think it was ever ethical. Conversely, doing the right thing may not be legal. For example, civil disobedience practiced by Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King — all of those broke the law as it was written, codified, at the time, but I don't think too many people would say that what they did was unethical or wrong. Kitty's example of taking the baby — I don't think anybody — it may have been against the law, but it wasn't an unethical act, in my opinion.

A former U.S. Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart, once wrote: ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is right to do. And that's pretty much what I would say. Or as Immanuel Kant: in law, a man is guilty when he violates the law; in ethics, he's guilty if he thinks of violating the law. So I think when you get down to it, ethics is basically, in my opinion, a conscious choice to act in a principled manner.

One thing I would sort of disagree with a little bit with what Kitty said — and it's maybe just nitpicking — is that we talk about — she started her discussion by talking about our profession, saying that back in the 40s, the 50s, whatever, it certainly did have a reputation of a rough and tumble type of profession. I don't think that the profession itself wasn't ever unethical. I think there were people that were unethical in the profession. I'm sure that there were investigators in the 40s and the 50s that were extremely ethical. So I think — and in fact, I kind of take issue with the whole idea of business ethics, and in some respects, so-called codes of ethics. I find a lot of corporate codes of ethics are really just a lot of PR pablum that they put out there to make themselves look good. You know, it drives me crazy when I hear — can you please, sorry Steve — it's okay — talking about some business codes that you'll see posted up on their websites, and their corporate ethics, to me, a lot of times are just things they say for PR purposes. They drive me crazy when I read — right here they'll say, you know, this or that, some ethical concept is our number one priority, after they just in fact have done something horrendous.

In fact, I think a business's ethical core and reputation is the sum total of the behavior of all its employees, which comes down from the top. If you are the leader and you are an ethical individual, more likely your employees will follow you if you teach them. On the other hand, if you as the leader have your employees cut corners, do things dishonest, make the wrong choices on your behalf — and this is one thing you can write down and take it to the bank — if you have an employee steal for you, they will steal from you. You can put that — so if for no other reason than that, you want to foster ethical standards by your own behavior, which will filter down to your employees.

I think, as Kitty said, ethics is really a pretty simple concept. First of all, they're as old as almost written history. They go back to the Greek philosophers — Plato and Socrates talked ethics. And the reason for ethics, like Kitty says, I think it really comes down to treating people as you want to be treated. Do unto others as they will do unto you. It's a very simple statement, but it's really profound. Nobody likes to be cheated, lied to, taken advantage of, treated unfairly, and if everybody acts that way to others, it's really simple. And that moral imperative, interestingly enough, can be found in the writings of virtually every faith. If you look through the Christian Bible, the Koran, Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, even paganism — writings have the concept of treating others as you want to be treated.

And as simple as that can be, at times it can be really tough. Ethics is easy when there's little at stake, when there's nothing to lose by being ethical or doing the right thing. If a store clerk gives you a little too much change and you return that, that's a nice thing to do, but it's not a real challenge. The real challenge comes when it costs more than you want to pay. That's when the tough gets tough — when you might lose a sale, or you might lose a customer, or you might lose an employee, or you might lose face by somebody, because you made a mistake and now you have to own up to it. Those are when it becomes tough.

So the question then comes, why should you be ethical? Well, I think first of all, it's the right thing to do. Society is better when we all act in an ethical manner; everybody gets treated better. But that being set aside, from a business perspective, I think you have to look at it as a short-term gain versus a long-term gain. Over the long term, if you run your business in an ethical manner — whether it's an investigative business or you're making widgets — if you run it in an ethical manner, the long-term gain, the long-term growth will be better. And I think everybody would agree that that's preferable to a short-term flash. In the short term, ethical relapses or dishonest choices might bring a short-term advantage, but over time most dishonest behavior comes to light. And you can read the paper every day and see that big corporations — corporations that have money, power, prestige — go down the tank. Enron, Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, Kraft Foods, Facebook, Wirecard, Nikola — just countless ones. It's in the business section almost every day. You can read about some company that took a short-term advantage, what they thought, and the penalties that they caught always hit harder. Aside from the embarrassment and bad press, the penalties went into the millions.

Mr. Singh made a point of saying that we should all act as if we're being watched. Well, let me tell you, you are being watched every day. We're all being watched — by the government, by our customers, but like Kitty mentioned, by the regulators, people that regulate us. Your own employees are watching you, your competitors are watching you. So you are being watched every time, by people you don't even know are watching you. And of course this is all compounded today even more so by social media. If you do something wrong, over time eventually it's going to come out, and it's not going to be something that you're going to want to have to deal with.

So, you know, other reasons that you want to act, I think, in an ethical manner: it's going to enhance your reputation in the long run, you're going to be able to have better employees, and better employees mean better service, better products. But enhanced reputation and better product and better service means more sales, and it means more money. So in the long run, there are some very practical reasons to make the right choices.

So one of the things that I always thought about when I would do these fraud cases is, if it's so obvious to me that it's more beneficial to make the right choices, why do so many people make the wrong choices? Mr. Singh hit it right on the head earlier when he said rationalization. When I was a kid and I would get in trouble and try to weasel my way out of it, my dad used to always say, you know, you can rationalize murder if you try hard enough. And it's true — you can rationalize anything. Plato once wrote that no one would do anything wrong if they couldn't rationalize it. I used to do a lot of interrogations on fraud, and basically what we would do, as an effort to get the person to admit their wrongdoing, would be to rationalize for him. We'd tell him, hey, you know, everybody does this, it's okay, you're not the only one that's done this. We make the rationalizations for them.

Some of the common rationalizations, like I just said, is: everybody does it, so I can do it. I'll only do it just this once — and of course that's not true. People learn to lie before they learn to steal. Small acts of dishonesty, because they're only going to do it just this once, become higher and higher and more serious and more serious. No one will ever know — that's a rationalization you hear all the time. I'll do it different the next time. It's not going to matter, it's not that important. So if you find yourself thinking these thoughts when considering a choice, you're probably on the wrong track, going down the wrong track.

Another reason people act unethical is a sense of entitlement — hubris and a self-inflated sense of worth. And you see that all the time in politicians, people in power, athletes, entertainers. They all think they can get away with it, and again, all you have to do is look in the paper and you'll see the rationalization that these people of power have when they take advantage of other people. Money is another reason, but I find that that's usually more symptomatic than a reason. I mean, there are a lot of wealthy people who are ethical. Henry Ford once said, money doesn't change men, it just unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish, arrogant or greedy, the money just brings it out, that's all. Instant gratification is another reason that people act in an unethical manner — again, short-term gain versus long-term progress.

Failure to stop and think — if we knew the consequences, most people wouldn't make the choice that they make. It was mentioned earlier about whether or not I took up parachuting as a short-term hobby. It was probably a midlife crisis or something, but I decided to take it up, and I had 87 jumps, most of them successful. People think that's a lot, but it's really not a lot — you need hundreds of jumps to know what you're doing. So on the day of my 87th jump, I went out to this drop zone and I did a couple of jumps in the morning, and they were fine. And it was right about lunchtime and I was going to think about doing one more, and I looked over to the west and I saw a storm was coming in. You could see the clouds building up in the west. So I looked over at a fella I knew — his name was Doogie — and I asked Doogie, I said, what do you think? He had hundreds and hundreds of jumps, maybe thousands of jumps. And he looked and he goes, ah, it doesn't look too bad, you know, you could probably do it. So I got on the plane and we went up to 13,500 feet, and I looked around the plane and I noticed Doogie wasn't on the plane. But I was. So I had a choice — I didn't have to get on the plane, but I did. And then as I walked to the edge of the airplane, it was time to jump, I looked again to the west and I could see that the clouds were getting a little closer. I had another choice I could have made — I could have stayed on the plane and rode it down, but nobody likes to be called a — so out I went. And the first thirteen thousand four hundred and eighty feet went fine. The last twenty feet got a little rough, when a big gust of wind came and ended up kind of collapsing my chute just as I was going into my stall, and I went the last 20 feet, landed, and ended up with a compression fracture in my back. Fortunately I recovered, I'm fine. But the point is — I knew — and by the way, there's another point: never go ask a guy named Doogie for advice — but I did. I knew when I went through the door of the plane, when I got on the plane, that I shouldn't have been doing it. So, you know, failure to stop and think. If I knew the consequences, I wouldn't have done it.

A lack of discipline is another reason that people will act without ethics. If you need to cheat on a test at school, you probably didn't study. Athletes who use steroids — that's a shortcut to strenuous workouts. And shortcuts in business almost always follow a failure to do the job right in the first place. Environment is important. If you surround yourself with dishonest people, and hang out with dishonest people, you are probably going to make the wrong choices too — just like if you hang around with a bunch of people that have tested positive for COVID-19, they're probably going to catch COVID. If, on the other hand, you surround yourself with ethical people, you will probably tend in that direction. We talked earlier about a lack of structure, I think, in ethics — putting your moral beliefs into action. Without that internalized moral code, you're unlikely to make the right choice. So you need to have that.

One other thing that I think that I would have to take exception a little bit with what Kitty said was when she talked about — and maybe it's just a matter of in what way you might be criticizing somebody — Kitty talked about not dogging your competitors. And I understand that, if it's an unwarranted thing. But if someone in our business, particularly in our profession, is dishonest — and there are dishonest investigators out there for sure — and you know that they're dishonest, I think it's incumbent upon you to call it out. The Irish philosopher Edmund Burke said evil triumphs when good men do nothing, and I think sometimes silence, and not calling some people out on their bad behavior, is a problem, creates a problem. So I think it depends on the reason you're calling them out. If you're calling them out because they have done something wrong, then I think that's a legitimate thing to do. If, on the other hand — the way that right now, at least in politics in the US, you'll see it — they'll only tolerate the misconduct if it's being done by somebody that they agree with politically; on the other hand, they'll be criticizing somebody that's of a different political stance — that's not, to me, doing the right thing.

So that's sort of, in brief, how I view ethics. I think in closing, it's always good to sort of take an ethical temperature as business people. Do you behave honestly with customers, suppliers and employees? Do you have one culture that applies to all? Do you hire people with good and sound character? Do you associate with other ethical people? Do you mentor your employees on ethical standards? And do you take care of your obligations? And I think if you do the above, or simply follow that golden rule of treating people like you want to be treated, you'll be successful as business people and as humans. Or as Mark Twain said, if you always do right, it'll gratify some people and astonish the rest. So for no other reason, that's another good reason to be ethical. Like I said, I'm not an ethicist. I'm just somebody that's kind of curious about ethics and likes to talk about it. And if somebody has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Thank you, Steve. I have a first question — the first question comes from Kitty Haley. She wants to clarify where she differs with you, right?

Steve, I appreciate your comment on my comment. I don't mean that you should not call out misconduct. I meant that you should not speak badly about someone, especially if you do not have evidence — that you don't malign another investigator just for the purpose of getting ahead. However, if someone is acting inappropriately and you have the opportunity to either talk to them and find out if they understand they're acting inappropriately, or report them to the proper authority, which might be the organization that you all belong to, so that they can be censured in a way that is fair and constructive — certainly, I can't disagree with that.

Okay, all right. You know, one of the things that, Steve, you said was, you learn to lie before you learn to steal. It's a very apt sort of a saying. But why do you think ethics and integrity are so important in life?

Why? Simply because it makes everybody's life better. It puts us in a better position as people, as society. If everybody always makes the right decision — which is, you know, a panacea — but if they do, there's no lying, there's no stealing, there's no taking unfair advantage of people. We're in a better world. So every step we take towards that goal makes us better people. I think it's like living in the Ayn Rand's world.

Kitty, what is your take on it?

Well, I think it's important. We all have to occupy this space together. We are not on our own, and establishing certain ways of treating each other helps to make it a better world, an easier world. People are not always nice, and they are not always kind, but it certainly is much more pleasant when they are, or when they're considerate of each other's rights. You know, I still remember a teaching from my father, which was a long, long, long, long time ago, because he's been gone for almost 40 years. But he used to say that freedom is your right to extend your arms and whirl like a dervish until you come within one inch of my nose, and that's where your freedom stops and mine starts. It's a very simple concept: be considerate of each other. It makes the world more pleasant, it makes it easier to work together, and certainly when you're doing the serious work that we do, it becomes really important to respect each other. Steve and I both have done criminal work. We've both walked people off of death row. We've both worked civil rights cases. He does more in the field of fraud than I do. But you know, we see injustice every day, and if we can stop it in some little way by our own actions, then we make it easier for everyone to function.

One more question that I have personally is that, you know, when you watch a lot of these Netflix movies and all, and you see the U.S. attorney generals and you see the prosecutors in the United States, they are most unethical in what the pictures portray. Is that a reality?

I think — yeah — a lot of the criminal defense cases that I have handled recently, especially the ones that have been featured on some of these shows, have evolved because of unethical behavior in some of these cases. There are a variety of reasons, including inept defense attorneys, but one of the prime reasons is hubris on the part of the prosecutors and the police in some cases, where they have this attitude of: we know he did it, we can't prove it. So — what I call it — they frame the guilty person. They take facts that don't exist and they put them on the guilty person, because they're so convinced that he did it. And if in fact the person is truly guilty, you can kind of get away with it. If somebody says, I saw him at the crime scene, and the person really was at the crime scene, it's tough for him to dispute it. But if the person in these cases is innocent, and someone says that, well, he knows they're either lying or they're mistaken, and if there's no way that they could be mistaken, then they must be lying. So yeah, it does happen. And it happens because of one of the reasons we talked about earlier — sort of rationalization: that we know this guy did it, and we wear the white hats, and so we're gonna put this person in jail. The problem with that is twofold. Number one is, a percentage of times they're putting an innocent person in jail, and while that innocent person is in jail, the guilty person is out there still creating havoc and mayhem, killing others in some cases — certainly the one case I had, killed other people, including another little girl.

And I'd like to add to that, that I don't think either of us is saying that all prosecutors are bad or all police are bad. There are wonderful people out there. We need our police force, we need a prosecutorial system. Unfortunately, sometimes people's own egos get in the way of them doing a good job. It becomes important for them to win, and the prosecutorial system isn't about winning, it's about adjudicating justice. And justice doesn't come about by being right all the time. No one person is right. No one prosecutor can say this person is guilty, that person is guilty, without doing a thorough investigation first. And when that's not done, the wrong people are punished. And well, it keeps Steve and I busy, because there are a lot of people wrongfully convicted in the United States, and unfortunately a lot of it is because of prosecutorial misconduct.

When prosecutors offer deals in exchange of information, is that ethical?

I don't think that's unethical. I think you have to be very cautious — they need to be cautious about it, because obviously there's a motive for the informant to lie. But every person that comes forward, everybody has a motive for some reason that they do. Very few people just do things altruistic. So I think you just have to look at it with a little bit of, you know, suspicion. But personally, I don't think it's unethical necessarily.

Yes, I'd like to intervene. I mean, a doubt is lurking in my mind. It's meant for both the speakers. Ms. Haley touched on various aspects of ethics, and ultimately she touched on one very important word, that is, situational approach. She has mentioned about the situational approach and ethics. You also have touched on ethics. I will try to have a little distinction between the ethics as far as an organization is concerned and integrity as far as a person is concerned. Integrity is more personal; ethics may be in terms of a particular organization. Now in certain organizations — like, I like to say, in certain organizations where, let us say, some intelligence organizations, or some organizations which have been given a duty to subvert something — they have to go by the code of conduct of that organization. It may be very unethical, you may be seeing, but an intelligence person may have to indulge into that, because the code of ethics for them is in terms of that particular situation or that particular organization, while he is being quite — his integrity is intact, he's complying with that particular code. So can you please explain — because many a time, I'm also resorting to the attorneys at times, and many times in intelligence agencies, and many times counterintelligence agencies, the ethics are governed by the particular situation and a particular organization. How do you spell them as unethical? How do you define them unethical? Both the speakers — I mean, this is a doubt that is in my mind. I wanted to ask both of you, because you have done a lot of research — Haley, particularly, you have done a lot of research, I have gone through — I mean, the entire approach is very nice. She explained about ethics, you were studying about various laws. You also told that we have not to exaggerate. All these things are good as far as the code which you have defined, but what about the organizational code?

Well, can I take that first, Steve? Yeah, okay. Most organizations do have codes of ethics, but what I found — because I researched every possible investigative code of ethics, in our country and internationally, before I put the book together — is that they are very similar, and they overlap. There is no one code of ethics that says something that counters completely what another code of ethics says. As a matter of fact, my book is a compilation of very carefully organized codes of ethics from around the world. What I did was, I started a huge flowchart, and every time I read a code of ethics, I entered it into my chart, and every time it repeated, I made another notation of it. And I ended up finding that almost every organization dealing with safety, security and investigation had similar tenets to it — most of them being that you uphold the highest integrity of the profession, that you are honest, that you do not cheat the people with whom you work. And while some of them left out one and substituted another, there was nothing that was overtly unethical. So while the association you're dealing with might have one code of ethics that says one thing, and another one has another code of ethics that says another thing, they're not that different. They all are very similar. They're simpatico. They work together.

That means that a thing might be ethical for one person, but the outsider may consider it unethical, who is not in that organization. Obviously there's no such defined — absolutely, there's no such cut and dried thing about ethics. That's right.

Yeah, I would think that ethics is more — to me, that's why these codes are nice, but in some respects, when you look at them, they're just basically kind of like laws. You know, they're a codified thing that's saying, okay, if you're going to be a member of our association, you can't do this, that, the other thing. Ultimately, to me, ethics is the choice you make based on your own morality. And if you have a sense of morality — and that's a pretty common thing, I mean, it's, you know, don't lie, don't steal, don't kill, don't do harm to people — it's a few simple rules, really, when you shake it all out. And the ethics is your individual choice to follow through with that. And to me it's a pretty simple thing.

Steve, it is like saying you steal a dollar, it is okay, but when you steal a thousand dollars, it's bad.

No, I don't think that's the case at all. I think if you steal a dollar or you steal a thousand, it's still the theft. You know, whether one's more serious, probably, but —

Sorry — what you may be doing at one time may be unethical for us, but you may be doing a very ethical thing in terms of you being upright and honest to your organization. Am I correct? Sure.

Mr. — we have been doing such a thing, because we used to buy the loyalty of the — I am from an intelligence organization. I have worked for about 35 years in the interest of the country. We used to buy the loyalties of organizations — terrorists, mainly. I have dealt with terrorism. We used to buy the loyalties. Unethical for them, ethical for us. Is it ethical? For us it is fully ethical; whether for them it is unethical, because we have done a thing we should not have done, because we have won over one of their persons to get information about them.

Can I add a comment there? You know, when we are children — I don't know in your country if you have them or not — but we used to play in sandboxes. Sandboxes are big things on the ground filled with sand, and children who couldn't go to the shore or the beach would play in them, with their buckets and their shovels, and little plastic things they would play with each other. Well, if you took your little shovel and you hit your playmate on the head, that was not a good thing, and your mom would say, don't hit Johnny, that's a bad thing, don't hit him. And so you knew you had to play with certain rules in the sandbox if you were going to be allowed to go back there. Well, now let's fast forward 20 years. You are now a member of the military. You are in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is another sandbox — it's just a very, very, very big sandbox. And your government says to you: shoot them, shoot everyone you see, hurt everyone you see. It is absolutely everything that your mommy taught you not to do 20 years previously. So the situation has changed. And so I don't think one organization that's an independent organization of professionals is saying to do anything wrong. But if you're working in a particular field, and you have needs that are protecting the citizens, as a government or a security officer or a member of a police force, you have rights and abilities and necessities that you do that are not a matter of your personal ethics, but a matter of your duty to the job that you're doing. And so it changes — everyone's change. I cannot do the same thing as a police officer in the private sector as I can in the public sector. And so we have to apply the ethics to each individual association and organization, but those that have greater latitude are usually government imposed.

So the definition would be — when we say workplace organization, the subject we started, ethics, and we said ethics in a workplace — so ethics will change according to the workplace. I'm talking about placement, working organization. So there's no such thing as a static approach. Absolutely, it has to change according to the — now what is the ultimate? I mean, of course, the ultimate is — what do you suggest, what do you propose — that ultimately one should be ethical to the organization in which — so that he is absolutely going by the code of conduct or by the laid-down principles or laid-down duties for him? Or should he think of only being very ethical morally, as you normally use the word morally? Or he should be absolutely — deem that that is immoral, so he should be modern and quit the organization and do something more? That means your definition — it says that it should be fluctuating. Am I correct?

It does, yes. Because the ethics are there, and the codes that you were to work under have been established, and if they do not work with your personal morality, then you have the opportunity to opt out and not do that. It's why we have in our country conscientious objectors, who do not go into the service because they object to what the service stands for. They object to hurting or killing or maiming others. And so you have the opportunity to make choices in this world. Whether you work for a company that you find is unethical — you can continue to work for them, or your own personal morality can cause you to move away from them and say, I don't have anything to do with them, I don't like the way they run their business, and I'm not going to continue to be with them. And that's where my concepts of ethics being of the group and morality being of the individual step in, and I think that that applies.

John, are you there? John Cenatra? I'm here. You know, you had a very large background screening company. How do you differentiate — how ethical is your organization?

Sir, as far as my organization is concerned, we have very strict controls controlling this in the industry, and we are completely vulnerable if we break these rules, like the privacy laws, GDPR. So we take extra care to see that we don't crawl across the boundaries. So ethics seems to be the most important success factor in our industry.

You use a lot of subcontractors. How do you ensure their ethics?

In fact, that is our skill. That is why vendor management becomes so very important. The process that we build to onboard vendors, to monitor their progress, to train and counsel them, happens to be a very, very important thing in our profession. Yeah, thanks.

General, are you there? You see, as far as situational ethics is concerned, it depends — from the private sector to a government organization like the police or the armed forces, there are certain factors which come into play. Like in the private sector, yes, you've got to have ethics. But when you come to a government organization, to get information, one has to — one could, at times, have to be a little rough. Would that be ethical?

Yeah, the question is that if you are rough to get information, is that ethical? Steve?

Can you clarify that question again for me one more time?

You see, the gentleman is a former general from the Indian Army, and at times, when, you know, they have to get information on various subjects, they tend to be rough with the people from whom they've got to get information. He says that being rough to get information which is vital to the nation — is it being ethical or not being ethical?

Well, I wouldn't judge, having not been in that situation. I can certainly understand that, and there is, you know, that old expression: the end shouldn't justify the means. But in a practical world, society, they do. Sometimes the ends do justify what needs to be done. So I wouldn't judge someone as being unethical in that circumstance. You know, I think — what can I tell you — I don't think — that's my view on it. What is yours, Kitty? What would you think about it?

Well, I think I already gave an answer to that when I gave my sandbox analogy — that the situation might call for a different manner of functioning. If you don't wish to be a part of it, then you remove yourself, because it's not personally what your morality will allow you to do. It takes a certain kind of person to be in the military and to harm others in order to help many. I don't know where I fall on this at this moment. I'm pretty much a pacifist, and I could not be a part of it, although I understand that sometimes it becomes necessary. So the ethics of your organization, which would be the military, is to use any means necessary to gather information that helps the entire country. If that is the ultimate goal, and that is the way you function, then I have no control over what you do. I would personally choose not to be a part of your military, because it goes against my personal morals. Does that clarify it?

To achieve the organizational goal — whatever your organization, army or foreign — to achieve the organizational goal, if you tend to stay away from the laid-down parameters of law of that organization, then it is unethical. The question is that there are certain laid-down parameters and ethics in every organization, the legal organization. I mean, if you are going beyond that, then probably it is unethical. But if you remain within the parameters laid down by the organization, legally, then you are being, of course, ethical, even if you have to be rough and tough. The question is whether you stay away from that particular attitude of yours and tend to become absolutely unethical in that organizational sense. We had to do a lot of things, as you know, in terrorism, but all the time the people who did it probably suffered subsequently, because they obviated — they went away from the laid-down parameters of law. So I think the ethics will then define, you know, such organization — what are the parameters laid down for you in the legal sense, in the legal terms.

Ultimately, what it means is it's a judgment call of an individual, whether it's an ethical situation or an unethical situation. Is that right, Kitty? I believe so, yes.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the end of a very interesting session, and I now hand it over to the president to sort of conclude the session. Please.

Thank you very much. The whole gamut of ethics and integrity was at length spaced by Kitty Haley. I could very well — I mean, I really appreciate the way she went about, starting from the definition of ethics. She defined ethics in so many ways, and that was a pinpoint of the entire situation. Then she dived from that particular situation onward. Then she also, in between, came to that — where there is a sort of exaggeration, that you should not do. Within the bounds of law is all right, but if you go and exaggerate — that also she touched. And then she also defined about the paths to be followed, and then she ultimately came to the situational approach, and that is where I wanted to ask, and already asked. So she has defined at length everything.

Steve has been absolutely immaculate, practical — A, B, C, D will be negative and correct, because it's not a question — because today you want this thing, that you go have this approach tomorrow. So in any case, the end result would be that whatever the standards are there, if you are following those standards, you are being ascended — or parameters or legal bonds — then you are ethical. But there is always a situation where you become unethical and say the others are doing so. I was saying that in this case, there is always a time when, at least, if you revert to ethics — if you have been doing unethical earlier, either in one organization or the other nation — then please refer to ethical law, because ultimately ethics is more important. Similarly, the collective efforts in any organization in terms of achieving goal — that will always — collective efforts would mean there are certain laid-down principles, and within those principles all the employees of the organization walk forward. That will add to the height and achievement of the organization.

And also I like to say only one more word, that there have been very, very interesting and scintillating questions coming forth, and our learned speakers have explained at length, and very clearly they have told. I am sure the delegates will carry many points from them, and I thank you very much indeed. We are thankful to you, Kitty Haley and Steve, for you having come and addressed the delegates of NISSMAT International.

Our next interactive session — this is a one-hour session — that is, Creating Happiness at Workplace. Now we are going a step further from ethics and morality at the workplace; we want to create happiness at the workplace. NISSMAT International has suggested this subject, Creating Happiness at Workplace, and we are getting a speaker, Kashyana, who is a Blackstone's affiliate organization's vice president. She is with Allied Solutions, and her TEDx speeches have been basically on work as worship. In America, USA, she has been speaking, and work as worship has been her mantra. So I am sure that she will be able to explain to others, with this work as worship, how she can create happiness at a workplace. With these words, I again request all the delegates who come here to please note the day, 10th December, 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you, Kitty. Thank you, Steve. Thanks, wonderful. Thank you, sir. Thank you, speakers. Thank you, thank you so much.

Yeah, can you take the thing off? Can you just take it off the screen? Henry from Vietnam, Ed, are you there? Yeah, he's there, but — okay. Steve, I'd like to thank you once again. Kitty Haley, thank you once again, and it's been an excellent session. Thank you all. Thank you. Nice to be on the panel with you, Steve. You too, Kitty. Okay, I've got to go, guys. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.