At end of day, BBB is a business too

To all you business owners and entrepreneurs out there, let me pose a few questions.

Have you ever made a hire with the best of intentions, only to have it blow up in your face later? Have you ever found your company showing up in the news — for the wrong reasons? And have you ever had a new employee pass through all your background checks with flying colors, only to rip you off later?

Unfortunately, in recent weeks we at the BBB have found ourselves answering “yes” to each of those questions.

The first two situations arose as a result of a hire we made some 15 months ago. Perhaps you read the article in this newspaper a few weeks back that we at the BBB, the torchbearer for promoting and rewarding exemplary business ethics in our region, had an employee on staff who had been convicted of defrauding scores of consumers in association with a predatory lending scam.

I have to admit that when presented in this context, I understand why some would respond with a what-in-the-world-were- they-thinking attitude. However, as with many stories we read in the news, there is much more to the situation than fits neatly in a few columns of type.

In this particular case, the person involved is one Sally Gibson, who joined the marketing department of the BBB in May 2005. Throughout the interview process, Sally was very upfront about her situation. She shared with us that she indeed had been convicted of conspiracy and wire fraud in the case regarding Century Mortgage, a company that was found to have falsified documents to help low-income home buyers qualify for loans they could not repay, leading to a host of foreclosures and lender losses.

Our investigation into the situation indicated that in our opinion, Sally seemed to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. She was not an employee of Century Mortgage, simply an outside Realtor who did business with them. And her case was on appeal.

In our daily work of shining the light of day on unethical and illegal behavior of some businesses, the BBB has witnessed case after case of good people being brought down by the illegal activities of a few unscrupulous business owners. This appeared to be one of those cases. The extensive due diligence we performed prior to offering Sally a position revealed her to be a straight-shooting, conscientious worker who would hold our best interests at heart. Even Sally’s sentencing officer at District Court seemed to share the view that she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was only upon my conversation with the newspaper reporter that I found out Sally’s appeal had been denied. Even Sally did not know. Blindsided with this piece of information, it suddenly changed everything I had believed about having hired her.

So you can imagine how I was caught off guard by any inference that somehow we had become a “halfway house for felons” (those were the exact words of one business owner I sat next to in a meeting recently). But in truth, we do need to be held to a higher standard in relation to business ethics if just for credibility’s sake. Every day, we hear from consumers and hold businesses’ feet to the fire for accountability. So we’re not above having our tootsies face the heat as well.

As we learned in this case, it is not just the facts of the situation that matters, it’s also the appearance. The last thing we can afford is sending the message we’re failing to “walk the talk” of business ethics.

And now, another story. This one about a personable individual who came to us with a flawless record, yet who came to embezzle funds by falsifying performance records (as we urge our members to do, we are pursuing this matter to the fullest extent of the law). Just goes to show, whenever you hire a new employee, you’re never 100 percent sure of what you’re getting.

You business owners know that. Now we know it, too.