WINTER 2025
BACK MATTER

_{WINTER 2025 |}_{BY THE NUMBERS}

^{See You Later, Alligator}

Exit interviews are a common HR tool used to gain insight into a departing employee’s job satisfaction. Many companies also use exit interviews to gather insights on the effectiveness of their ethics and compliance program, and the overall state of their culture, as shown by this data from Ethisphere's benchmarking platform, The Sphere.

88%

of World’s Most Ethical Companies honorees ask about the departing employee's working relationship with their manager

35%

of all organizations ask exit interview questions specifically structured to assess the departing employee's organizational justice perceptions

68%

of World’s Most Ethical Companies honorees asked if the employee was aware of/concerned about unethical events. That figure drops to only 57% for all companies

50%

of all organizations ask about the departing employee's perception of the organization's diversity, equity, & inclusion

Build a process to share the responses with the E&C team.

Leslie Benson, Ethisphere

_{FINAL THOUGHT |}_{WINTER 2025}

Eleazar's Story

^{by BILL COFFIN | Editor-in-Chief,}^{Ethisphere Magazine}

Eleven years ago, I began researching my family history and ran into a dreaded “brick wall:” determining the identity of my great-great-great-great grandfather. Theories abound, and one I decided to chase was a fellow named Eleazar Coffin, who lived in Bucks County, PA and Hunterdon County, NJ, in the years shortly after the American Revolution. I’m pretty sure Eleazar is our guy, but since we don’t yet have firm evidence of it, I keep researching him. And as I did, I discovered he had been busted for counterfeiting in 1794.

As far as I can tell from various court documents, in May 1794, Eleazar gets hauled into court by the county sheriff to pay an outstanding debt of £35 to someone named Joshua Anderson. £35 doesn’t seem like a lot, but bear in mind that the average annual U.S. salary at the time was only £14. If somebody owed me twice my annual salary, I’d call the sheriff on them, too.

If somebody owed me twice my annual salary, I'd call the sheriff on them, too.

In July 1794, Eleazar and an accomplice, Phillip Bevan, are indicted for milling fake silver coins and are ordered to pay £35 plus another £70 interest. It sure looks like Eleazar tried to pay off Joshua Anderson in fake money, even though the New Jersey state currency bore the warning, “To Counterfeit is Death.” Defrauding Joshua Anderson (and the public) is lowdown, but roping in some jamoke to help you do it is even more so.

In September 1794, Coffin and Bevan tell the court that there is no way they can pay what they owe, so in October 1794, the court ups that amount to an astounding £300. At more than 21 times the average salary, a personal fine of that size on a fraud-minded deadbeat appears to be “never show your face around here again” kind of money. And I think Eleazar took the hint, because there is no further official record of him in New Jersey or Pennsylvania after that. No census data, no land records, no obituary, no nothing. I suspect he changed his name and went to ground to evade his creditors.

When I relayed all of this to my wife, she referenced someone in our family with a history of sketchy behavior and says “so that’s where they get it from.” As always, she makes a strong point.

We are entering challenging times as a community that is dedicated to business integrity. A CEO was shot dead in broad daylight and people cheered about it online. Companies are proclaiming the closure or rollback of their DEI offices. Public leaders are finding brazen new ways to signal their bad faith. Trust in public institutions remains rock-bottom, but trust in businesses in general has taken its first big step down in recent memory.

It all feels like a collective objection to a truth that we hold to be self-evident: that building strong ethical frameworks also

builds sustainable value. Thankfully, Ethisphere has, over the years, gathered no small amount of data to prove that point, including the vaunted Five-Year Ethical Premium that shows how companies that create best-in-class ethics programs outperform their peers.

But the figure I’m going to keep going back to is £35, the sum that launched Eleazar’s descent into erasure. There’s probably a reason why his kids never kept any record of him, or why I imagine local authorities were probably glad to see the back of him. There are always scofflaws who cut corners, flaunt rules, and violate the legal, social, and personal promises that bind us together. Some are folks who think there's nothing wrong with paying a bribe to make their figures. Others sit in positions of great authority. None of them realize how self-destructive their methods are.

The truth is, as unruly and disquieting as our immediate future promises to be, it is worth remembering that business integrity activity actually went up in 2016 as organizations knew that strong ethics made better long-term business sense than the alternative. That has not changed.

People are always going to be messy and complicated. Eleazars are always gonna Eleazar. And as long as that remains so, then the value—and need—for people who make it their business to advance business integrity will never truly come into question.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to deal with some knucklehead who wants me to get in on creating an $ELEAZAR cryptocurrency.

See you next issue. ■

There are always scofflaws who violate the legal, social, and personal promises that bind us together. None of them realize how self-destructive their
methods are.

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