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Should Halliburton’s Tim Probert be held personally liable for the Gulf Oil Spill?
As President of Halliburton’s Global Business Lines and its senior Environment, Health, & Safety Officer, Tim Probert has overall responsibility for the company’s safe, environmentally conscious operations. When things go so far off the rails, as they did in the Gulf of Mexico, should people be able to sue him as an individual? Should BP’s Corporate Responsibility officials? How about Transocean’s?
Notice I didn’t ask, “can they be held” liable. I asked, “should they be.” Right now, they can’t be held personally accountable. But if Corporate Responsibility aspires to the same level of professionalism of say the medical, legal, or accounting professions, at what point do professionals take on positive obligations?
If an attorney knows his client is going to lie on the stand he has an obligation as an officer of the court to stop him or report it. Attorneys that don’t get disbarred and/or go to jail. If an accountant knows her company is falsifying financial information she has an
obligation to report it. Why not CR professionals?
If Mr. Probert or his counter-parts at BP or Transocean knew their companies were operating substandard environmental, health, and safety procedures, did they have an ethical or professional obligation to do something about it?
In my Forbes blog, I said, “you can’t comply your way to greatness.” Right now, Mr. Probert and his colleagues are off the hook if (and that’s still a big IF) their companies were compliant. But compliancy is not responsibility. Responsible companies don’t just do the minimum required by law or regulation. They hold themselves to a higher standard. Maybe Mr. Probert and his colleagues shouldn’t be held criminally or civilly liable — unless of course they broke the law. But perhaps CR as a profession needs options — self-regulating options — similar to debarment that we could deploy in cases like this.
The Corporate Responsibility Officers Association’s Professional Development Committee has put forth an ethics code. Does it go far enough?
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On May 26th, 2010 at 7:47 pm jeff w. owens Said:
I live near Zion, Illinois. Zion used to have a plant online, but it was shut down, some say because of over regulation. I don’t know anything about that. What I DO know is what I see down in the Gulf, with the massive oil spill ongoing. In that case, regulators seemed to be in bed with the companies they were supposed to regulate. The quagmire we see down there is a direct result of failure to regulate properly.
I have always been in favor of nuclear energy. I have long thought that the current uses of oil should be obscure footnotes in history books by now. No way should we STILL be relying on this source of energy. But, politics and greed always seem to get in the way of progress, and better ideas.
These days, the problem I see with nuclear is safety. To be clear, I am a novice on this. I’m just a concerned citizen, not an expert. But in two areas that need strict regulation to insure safety, oil related companies and the airline industry, I see corruption, incompetence, conflict of interest, and patronage systems leading to less controls now than ever.
Because federal regulatory agencies don’t seem to have the teeth to actually enforce controls anymore, I think relying on nuclear power might be a risky proposition. Again, I am for nuclear power. I just don’t trust the regulatory agencies will do their job to insure safety procedures will be enforced and followed at this time. However, I am totally for research towards perfecting the safe use of nuclear energy, as well as wind, solar, etc.
On May 28th, 2010 at 5:42 pm Richard Crespin Said:
You raise some great points. Here’s the problem with regulatory authority: as the world gets more complex, we rely more on increasingly technical fields of expertise from fewer and fewer people. The number of people who really understand financial derivatives enough to regulate them is quite small. Same thing with deepwater drilling and nuclear power. It’s almost inevitable that we will have a revolving door between industry and regulator because of the expertise required in these highly technical fields. There just aren’t enough trained professionals in these fields… and probably never will be.
Here’s a third way: professionalize Corporate Responsibility. The people in charge of environmental, health, & safety programs, corporate governance, compliance, etc., should belong to a profession with watchdog powers. Accountants belong to the AICPA. Doctors to the AMA. Attorneys to the ABA. They owe allegiance to their profession and if they step out of line with accepted behavior are subject to peer review and censure. They can lose their license, be debarred,
Their livelihood is on the line with each decision they make. In this way we would have a “side door” into companies, subjecting them to additional accountability.