Sherri, thank you for the candid response. I would agree that, eventually, unethical behavior that occurs on a wide scale will eventually come to light. Unfortunately, it appears that many scandals involving both public and private organizations harm many individuals before they are disclosed and resolved. As we discussed in the Ponzi scheme involving Madoff, it may take a considerable amount of time for these issues to be discovered, and much harm can result while the unethical behavior continues. As Ferrell, Fraedrich, and Ferrell (2015) point out, accountability is a key factor in an organization’s ethical conduct. In the case of the VA, it appears that executives had some level of plausible deniability which may have contributed to their
