Courtesy Bill Petros/Georgetown Business

Ethics Institute Executive Director of the U.N. Global Compact for Business George Kell called integrity and trust the keys to rebuilding ethics in the busine

Representatives of businesses, universities and non-governmental organizations from around the world gathered this past weekend in the Leavey Center for Georgetown’s Transatlantic Business Ethics Conference. The conference, themed “Corporate Integrity and Accountability: A Global Challenge,” aimed to discuss the future challenges of business ethics following a year of legal controversy that focused on questions of ethics in the business sector.

Professor George Brenkert of the McDonough School of Business teaches a course on business ethics and is editor of Business Ethics Quarterly. Brenkert said bringing together businesses, universities and NGOs and trying to address “corporate integrity” from three different perspectives was a very special effort. “We’ll all be speaking English, but we’ll all have different languages we speak because of the different areas we come from,” he said.

The Global Compact is an international initiative “to bring companies together with U.N. agencies, labor, NGOs and other civil society actors to foster action and partnerships in the pursuit of good corporate citizenship,” according to the United Nations Global Compact for Business Web site.

The Global Compact focuses on ethical principals in the areas of human rights, labor standards and the environment. The Compact encourages companies to integrate these principles into their business operations and get involved in the United Nations projects. “Power and responsibility cannot be separated,” Executive Director of the United Nations Global Compact for Business George Kell said. Kell gave the keynote address Saturday evening in Riggs Library.

Kell said poverty is a very important issue on the United Nations Agenda. “We are trying to bring the poor to the markets,” he said. According to Kell, the Global Compact started a project to pursue sustainable business development in the least developed countries at the World Summit of Sustainable Development, which took place in Johannesburg in September. He said the companies committed to invest in LDCs, and the countries welcomed them.

According to Kell, the Global Compact can help companies build trust. “You can’t mandate trust, you can mandate fear. Trust is built through social interaction. This is why we believe the Global Compact at a global level is an opportunity for companies to earn trust . to learn how to work with others and open their eyes to the global challenges,” he said.

Brenkert said there is a whole host of measures that have to be taken in order to avoid continued corporate scandals and regain the trust of investors. He said legislative changes like the Sarbanes-Oxley Bill and changes in the culture of businesses are necessary.

The Senate passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Bill in July, creating “an independent accounting board to police the accounting profession,” according to a CNN report. It is designed to prevent corporate scandals like those at Enron and WorldCom.

“A continued active observation or monitoring of businesses by various outside groups [business groups or NGOs] is very important,” Brenkert said.

Brenkert said the funding of election campaigns by large corporations is very crucial. “What we should want to try to minimize is the extent to which the political process is corrupted through the use of large sums of money. I think many people in large corporations themselves feel that they have been manipulated by the political process. If they don’t give money, then their interests will be affected. It’s a two way street here,” he said.

Brenkert said people in the private sector may know more than government officials about certain issues, but that information is necessary to bring about justified laws and policies. “What we clearly need is to have an interchange between private and public spheres in which the knowledge and expertise of those in the private sphere of corporations is brought to bear in a way such that rational and just laws are passed. But not in a way which corrupts that process simply to the disadvantage of other people or environment,” he said.

“Corporate integrity, accountability and business ethics . are not the frosting on the cake, they should be part and parcel of the entire enterprise itself. If they are simply a code of ethics tacked on the wall, if they’re simply something the CEO talks about when he talks to a civil group, then that business isn’t serious about business ethics,” Brenkert said.

The Transatlantic Business Ethics Conference was organized by the Georgetown Business Ethics Institute and sponsored by Levi Strauss & Co. and ING Group.