An Unethical Culture in need of Change

Running head: AN UNETHICAL CULTURE IN NEED OF CHANGE
An Unethical Culture in need of Change
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1AN UNETHICAL CULTURE IN NEED OF CHANGE
Question 1: Analyse the ethical culture at TAP. Does the culture appear to be in alignment?
Misalignment?
Answer:
The ethical culture of TAP Pharmaceuticals can be identified after reading the case study
of TAP Pharmaceuticals. There were much misconduct, which persisted within the organization,
and they followed lot of unethical behaviour in the organization. In TAP Pharmaceuticals, there
was lack of in-house legal counsel that evaluates new marketing plan strictly (Silverstein 2015).
Instead, TAP Pharmaceuticals considered it to be a “sale preventive department “ , rather than a
source that would help everyone in order to comply with the law, on the contrary they
emphasized on pushing their products by any means. TAP Pharmaceuticals used to bribe the
doctors with an administration fee in order to prescribe patients with the new drug, Lupron,
produced by them. They used to provide samples of these drugs at a discounted price or free to
the physicians to promote their products. The sales representatives of the company also used to
encourage the doctors to charge Medicare full price, even if they were offered discounts .They
used to give incentives to the urologists who administered , Lupron , the new drug of TAP for the
cure of prostate cancer (Wang, Mencher and McCarron 2015.). The incentives included screen
television ,boats, second homes ,office equipment and golf vacations .It was also noticed that the
sales representatives of the company did not used to keep track of the free samples given away,
which is required according to law.
It can be said that there were no systems in place in order to encourage ethical conduct in
TAP Pharmaceuticals and all the systems in TAP Pharmaceuticals is strongly misaligned to
support ethical culture (Nelson, Taylor and Walsh 2014) .