Oversight Ethics: The Case of Business Licensing

The ethics research community has all but ignored issues of oversight ethics – the vices and virtues of overseers. This study develops a conceptual framework for exploring the ethics of oversight and provides insights into the design of codes of ethics for oversight institutions and for overseers. A...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Friedberg, Asher (Author) ; Schwartz, Robert (Author) ; Amrani, Shuki (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2004
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 2004, Volume: 53, Issue: 4, Pages: 371-381
Further subjects:B business permits
B oversight policy
B Oversight
B audit ethics
B business licensing
B oversight ethics
B Licensing
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Summary:The ethics research community has all but ignored issues of oversight ethics – the vices and virtues of overseers. This study develops a conceptual framework for exploring the ethics of oversight and provides insights into the design of codes of ethics for oversight institutions and for overseers. Analysis of business licensing in Israel reveals prospective and retrospective oversight ethics problems at the levels of national and local policy and implementation: Overseers failed to act on knowledge of breaches of business licensing stipulations and took action known to be slow and ineffective; policymakers neglected their duty to enact significant policy change in an oversight system that was clearly not working. Partially as a result of these oversight failures, over one third of Israeli businesses are unlicensed, 23 people were killed in the collapse of an unlicensed banquet hall, 2 major fires erupted in the same shopping mall, and a fire in a fertilizer warehouse very nearly became a mega-disaster.
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1023/B:BUSI.0000043499.27246.c8