Doing your ethical best

By Sean Brenner

Imagine for a moment you're in Washington, D.C., on a business trip. UCLA has paid for your hotel room and airfare, and you're being reimbursed for lunches and dinners.

Amazingly, your meetings have ended several hours before your flight back to LAX. Rather than eat lunch, you'd like to head to Pennsylvania Avenue and pick up some White House souvenirs. After all, UCLA won't notice the difference if a lunch expense is used for something else — you were going to spend the money anyway, right?

Wrong.

As participants in UCLA's stewardship roundtables can tell you, the university's reimbursements are "actual cost reimbursements," so meal money really is for meals — not souvenirs.

That's just one of a dozen different predicaments — including some, like this one, based on actual cases — that employees ponder at these roundtables, which are held quarterly by the Office of the Controller and the Controls Work Group to help staff and faculty recognize and respond to potential ethical issues. "These case studies are very applicable" to everyday work, said Cecilia Kness, a recent roundtable participant and an associate director of administrative support services in Communications Technology Services. "It's good practice to brainstorm solutions and get clarification on appropriate actions and actual policies."

To many UCLA employees, ethics training might sound like something best suited for colleagues who handle financial transactions or student records. But ethical questions crop up for everyone and everywhere, from hiring to research guidelines, and from grant writing to conflict-of-interest concerns.

The roundtables are just part of UCLA's multipronged approach to ethics. Last year, for the first time, staff and faculty throughout the UC system took an online ethics briefing. There are also financial management seminars, a quarterly newsletter and ethics primers that are part of new-employee orientation sessions. Besides highlighting sometimes little-known policies, the outreach is designed to inform staffers about which campus offices can help them solve potentially thorny issues.

"We want people to be able to figure out how to do things right instead of worrying that someone with a badge is coming after them when they're doing something wrong," said Ann Pollack, assistant vice chancellor of research.

Mission accomplished, said Charlene Flowers-Taylor, senior administrative analyst at the dental school. Ethics was covered in classes she's taken in financial management and internal controls and risk assessment. "The classes give me an awareness of what UCLA offers, whom to call for certain issues and how to find the course of action if we need to rectify any holes in our system," she said.

An added consideration at public institutions like UCLA is good stewardship — properly managing assets, financial or otherwise.

"So if you're not handling financial resources, but you're managing people, you're doing it with ethics and respect," said Susan Abeles, associate vice chancellor and controller in Corporate Financial Services. "And if you're a facilities manager, you're doing the best job you can to ensure your space is being adequately maintained and health and safety issues are taken care of.

"What we're really trying to say is that we expect you to do the best job you can with the resources you're responsible for," Abeles said.

As employees of UC, which receives funding from the state as well as federal government, faculty and staff also are stewards of the public trust, noted Lubbe Levin, associate vice chancellor of Campus Human Resources. "We're spending taxpayer dollars, and we have a significant contract and grant portfolio. So we have a special responsibility to carry out policy and program requirements effectively and efficiently."