The Business Ethics Blog

The Simpsons & Jon Stewart have so numbed me to irony that I’m not sure I even recognize it any more.
Anyway, this story strikes me as ironic.

A senior Wal-Mart executive, Thomas M. Coughlin, apparently covered up the fact that he was stealing from the company by claiming that the expenditures were for a blatantly unethical (and maybe illegal) anti-union project. Oddly, the anti-union project apparently never existed. So, fake wrong-doing covered for real wrong-doing.

The full story: “Was Wal-Mart’s Anti-Union Image Used as a Shield?”, by Michael Barbaro @ the New York Times.

The union project, according to Mr. Coughlin, was a secret scheme, approved by senior Wal-Mart executives, to pay union members for information about which stores they planned to organize.

A year later, when Mr. Coughlin was accused of misusing more than $500,000 in company funds through fraudulent reimbursements, the union project became the heart of his defense, and it immediately transformed the case into a symbol of anti-unionism on the part of Wal-Mart. Reporters seized on it, labor groups issued a flurry of angry press releases about it and the National Labor Relations Board began an investigation into it.

But Mr. Coughlin’s agreement to plead guilty to federal wire fraud and tax evasion charges, which two people close to the negotiations disclosed on Friday, and the lack of evidence that he used the missing money to spy on unions raise doubts as to whether such a project even existed.