Gift Giving in Modern Business

3 Pages 732 Words

The Ethics of ‘Gift Giving’ in modern business is one of the hottest topics of debate. It seems that many problems arise every day that seem to have some affiliation with unethical gift giving. One of the prime examples is found in the sports world.
While many would like not to believe it, college athletics are very much a lucrative business. Because of the demand for world-class athletes, many organizations find it necessary to attract their prospects by methods legal as well as illegal. One of the methods used most often is of course the ploy of gift giving. So much of this is done undercover that it is hard to get an accurate statistic, but some say that gift giving is common in one way or another at almost every major collegiate school. This is an alarming comment because along with gift giving comes the possibility of huge penalties. These include huge fines that are handed out as well as suspension from collegiate sports activities and also firings. But to many institutions it seems like a necessary option to pursue.
Another Example of gift giving is found as high as our US government, if that were much of a surprise. Mike Espy, the former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture was accused of accepting gifts from the companies that he was supposed to regulate. It is obvious from this incident that the acceptance of illegal gifts is not a light topic. Regulation of agriculture is a very important task that needs to be taken seriously for the safety of our nations foods, if something as simple as gift giving can affect that safety than it is easy to see why we need regulations on it.
Because gift giving is becoming common is the average work place, many companies are now trying to set limits on their gift giving policies to try and tame down the amount of ‘buttering up’ that can be done by other parties. In many incidents the monetary limit for gifts is being set at 20-50$, this makes it less likely that one empl...