Business Ethics Report: Handling Employment Issues at Amazon

The report details a business ethics case encountered at Amazon, where a Human Resource Assistant discovered an employee had submitted fake educational certificates. The employee, who had worked at Amazon for ten years and performed excellently, faced potential termination according to company policy. The report outlines the ethical problem, alternative solutions considered (including termination versus early retirement), and the final recommendation. The author, acting as the acting chief Human Resource officer, decided to suggest early retirement to the employee to allow him to receive retirement benefits and provide for his family, considering his circumstances and performance. This decision was made after weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each option, focusing on the employee's welfare and family needs.

Running head: BUSINESS ETHICS 1
Business Ethics
Name
Institution
Author’s Note

BUSINESS ETHICS 2
Employment issue
Fake education documents
Facts regarding the case
Every organization has its codes of conduct that ensure its employees are qualified by
providing original educational certificates and resumes to the HR department. Ethics is a
standard set of behavior that dictates how people should act in many situations they find
themselves in (Purnamawati, 2018). At the workplace, ethics will tell how you perform your
duty (Soehari, & Budiningsih, 2017). An individual may choose to use ethics positively or
negatively and maybe get fired alongside other employees (Merchant, & White, 2017).
I worked at Amazon as a Human Resource Assistant for a period of one year. Within this
office, we were three of us who could discuss and share on some matters of the organization,
such as recruitment of employees, salary reductions or increase, employees' welfare, and
employment terminations. One of the days when the chief Human Resource officer was on
maternity leave, I was going through all employees' files to be able to ascertain different progress
done by employees for promotion purposes. I discovered that one of the highest performing
employees presented fake educational certificates (Leicht-Deobald et al., 2019). This
organization is clear in its policies that all employees must be qualified, and in the event, it is
noticed that one provided fake documents, the individual's employment is terminated with
immediate effect. This employee should not be entitled to any benefits from this organization
too.

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Statement of the ethical problem
An employee was offered a job opportunity with fake academic credentials.
Alternative solutions
This particular employee had worked for Amazon for ten years and was performing
excellently in the clearing and forwarding sector. Being in this position of acting chief Human
Resource officer, I called this employee and inquired from him much on his educational
background. It was true that the documents were not original, and the employee studied a very
different thing from what he was doing at Amazon. After a discussion with the other fellow, I
decided to further my conversation with this employee, and I was able to get his story, and the
kind of life he was living.
In such a case, many options were available to choose from to be able to send this
employee home for providing fake education certificates. One of these options was to terminate
his contract with immediate effect and send him home without any benefits. This was one of the
ways described by the organization to handle such cases. It has the advantage of discouraging
any future act of such manner and put any other employee who might have done the same to take
action and resign to make way for only qualified employees (Herena, 2017). According to the
condition of this employee, I saw a very big disadvantage of subjecting him to employment
termination. His family was wholly dependent on this job. This was going to affect more than
one person.
The other alternative that I had to use was advising this employee to write a resignation
letter. This is the same thing my fellow told me to advise the employee (Kusumawardani &

BUSINESS ETHICS 4
Agintiara, 2015). I saw this to be the same as terminating the contract since the employee was
not going to get any benefit, and his family was going to face the rough side of life.
Recommendation
Regardless of the organization's requirements, I decided to talk to him about the
organization's policies and repercussions of this action. His story was sad and i suggested for him
to request early retirement since he was just three years away from his retirement age. He agreed
and did the request letter that landed in my hands. I did this to make him be able to benefit from
retirement benefits to be able to take care of his family since he narrated to me about a landslide
that destroyed much of his wealth and made him miserable again. He was able to get his early
retirement and went home.
In considering the family, I had to ask this employee to request for early retirement to be
eligible for retirement benefits that were going to help him provide for the family. Being that he
experienced a loss of properties during a landslide, he was in need of support, and this job was
the only support to his family. These retirement benefits may not have equaled the same money
he was getting as salary, but at least he was sure to get something even when he goes ahead to
gather more somewhere else. Before making this decision, I weighed all the available
alternatives, and I saw it was fair and good for the man and his family since he was really
performing and had no issues as far as the organization's operational policies are concerned.

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References
Herena, M. R. (2017). True alignment is critical to decision making. People & Strategy, 40(2),
11-13.
Kusumawardani, R. P., & Agintiara, M. (2015). Application of fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS method for
decision making in human resource manager selection process. Procedia Computer
Science, 72, 638-646.
Leicht-Deobald, U., Busch, T., Schank, C., Weibel, A., Schafheitle, S., Wildhaber, I., & Kasper,
G. (2019). The Challenges of Algorithm-Based HR Decision-Making for Personal
Integrity. Journal of Business Ethics, 160(2), 377-392.
Merchant, K. A., & White, L. F. (2017). Linking the ethics and management control
literatures. Advances in Management Accounting, 28(1), 1-29.
Purnamawati, I. G. A. (2018). Individual perception of ethical behavior and whistleblowing on
fraud detection through self-efficacy. Jurnal Keuangan dan Perbankan, 22(2).
Soehari, T. D., & Budiningsih, I. (2017). Analysis of strategic factors of human resources
management for corruption prevention. International Journal of Applied Business and
Economic Research, 15(6), 225-247.