How could a firm use the internet to promote the business ethics and social responsibility it practices?
The internet is just a tool. Your ethics must reside in your character before they translate to the tools you use.
Companies actually find that the internet is a problem for ethics and social responsibility when it breaks across internal controls. You can post on a web site as many meaningful promises as you want, but when your employees (especially senior management) can use the internet to gain access to areas that are supposed to be strictly seperated among employees, you have not just a violation of ethics but a violation of the law and can lose your ability to sell stock to the public.
An example of this would be making company accounting records of any kind available to the public. The COSO framework required by auditing standards include seperation of duties, and access to records is prohibited to people who are assigned either company assets (such as checks and invoices) or assigned authority to sign or issue. |
