The Ethical Barometer

Pfizer follows Eli Lilly, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline in disclosing payments to docs for consulting and speaking on their products. Pfizer also disclosed payments to academic centers, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants.  You can now go to the sites for these companies and search payments by recipient name.  A Pew Center director grinched that the disclosure was not as good as a national data base.  Conflicts resolution requires either not doing it or disclosing it.  The pharmas and, as a result, the docs, have done the latter.  They are done.

The “Nine you’re fine, ten you’re mine” motto of traffic officials is falling by the wayside.  The 5-10 mph grace speed for exceeding limits has fallen victim to tight state and local budgets.  They need more money so drivers are getting tickets for driving above the speed limit.  No  cushions allowed and very few warnings.  Nice to see that we are back to obeying the law, even if it is all economically motivated, on both sides.

For 2009, there were only 630 U.S. companies that filed earnings restatements.  The high for restatements was in 2006 and totaled 1,564, but we are in a steady decline.  Both extent and magnitude are down.  Further, the restatements filed in 2009 covered only about 1.5 years vs. the multi-year statements of yester-year.  Don’t consider earnings manipulation a lost art or abandoned practice.  Wait to see what happens as the economy presses upon those who compute and file.

The FCC is investigating the now-pulled Fox series, “Our Little Genius” because of questions regarding “how some information was relayed to contestants during preproduction.” Did these television producers and directors never see the movie “Quiz Show”?  Have they never heard of “Twenty One” or “The $64,000 Question”?  How history repeats! Feeding answers to contestants is poor form even if the upshot is that you are shown to be dumber than your fifth grader.

The Pope has offered his apologies for the “sinful and criminal” conduct of the priests.  He has spoken of betrayal of trust.  However, the key element missing in the Vatican’s handling of the sexual abuse scandal that has crawled across Europe is discipline.  The pope took no action against bishops who reassigned priests to parishes after psychiatrists warned that they should never work with children again. Continue reading →

The U.S. Secretary of Education would ban basketball teams from March Madness unless they could show a 40% graduation rate — that’s 2 of every 5 players.  Secretary Duncan called it a “low bar.”  Well, it’s fairly high for many tournament schools:  Arkansas (29%), California (20%), Maryland (8%), and Washington (29%).  Nine other schools were in the 30% range. In unrelated but relevant news, Seton Hall fired its coach for losses as well as for signing players accused of duct-taping 8 folks together during an armed robbery. Good luck with those grad stats, Mr. Secretary.  Continue reading →