Ethical Dilemma: The Madoff Affairs

The Madoff Scandal
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The Madoff Scandal
Bernie Madoff is an American former market maker, a financier and an investment advisor who is currently serving a prison sentence after being convicted for public fraud through a massive Ponzi scheme. Dubbed the Madoff investment scandal, the scheme was a major case that involved stock and securities fraud, which was discovered late in 2008. Michael Bienes worked with the company and failed to take appropriate measures to avoid falling victim of the scheme.
Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC was founded in 1960 by Madoff, and operated the company until his arrest. Madoff employed his brother Peter as a senior managing director and the chief compliance officer, his sons Mark and Andrew and his brother’s daughter all held different positions in the company. The investment became so successful that everyone in the world of finance desired to be him. However, things changed overnight. People lost significant amounts of money that saw the investment branded as the biggest Ponzi schemes in the country’s history. The scandal left the financial world devastated with the total amount of money lost exceeding $60 billion dollars. One of the victims, who happened to be Madoff’s accountant, was Michael Bienes.
Before joining Madoff, Bienes was working for Madoff’s father in law, Sawl, and decided to join Madoff after he was promised a good amount of money as salary and that is when he became his partner. All of this time, he kept thinking of how he was getting rich and thinking that it was a blessing from God and did not even at one point think that he was dealing with a fraudster. During the interview with the Frontline published in PBS, Bienes narrated how Bernie never wanted them to get licensed with SEC since he knew that whatever he was doing was fraudulent (Smith & Gaviria, 2009). Bernie owned them and thus they could not object to whatever issue he raised. The deal appeared to be so transparent that none of his workers dared to think of it as a scheme. Absolving oneself from such a scandal would be a very difficult task. To prevent this from happening, Bienes would have applied the ethical decision making model to determine the authenticity of the business.
Ethical Framework
An ethical decision-making model is a framework that guides people in examining an ethical dilemma and seeking a solution to the problem identified. It involves examination of the situation and applying five principles of ethics to solve. These principles include autonomy, justice, beneficence, nonmaleficence and fidelity. According to the ethical framework, Biennes could have followed the following steps.
Identification of the Problem
This step involves gathering as much informatio...