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4 Deception at Work

BUYING TIME of tough instruction, but I always deflected
her so she ended with the promise of
‘I put the phone down. These conversations another chat tomorrow. This was fine by me.
were always the same with Mary [Mary Walz Each tomorrow I passed was another day …
was his functional manager whose career I just needed to buy time.’
was seriously damaged by Mr Leeson’s
dishonesty]. She tried to give me some kind

When Tony Railton, an auditor from Baring’s head office, was sent to Singapore to sort out
the trading positions, Mr Leeson said:

INCREDIBLE EXPLANATION

‘I wondered what Tony Railton had ‘“It’s a consolidation account we use,
uncovered. My list of deceit was too long something like the gross account reporting
… it could have been anything from the we do for you,” I said airily. This was all
Balance Sheet to the Citibank account or to gobbledegook. He couldn’t possibly
the 88888 account. I waited for him. Then swallow this one. I put one hand out of sight
the penny dropped and then the millions below my desk and pinched my thigh to
dropped. I realised Railton was asking me a stop myself from laughing at my own idiocy.
question rather than accusing me of fraud My explanation made no sense, but it was
… and wrestling me to the ground in a the best I could come up with on the spot
citizen’s arrest. If he was asking a question and he believed it.’
he might not know the answer.

For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill …

Fortunately you may never be confronted with someone quite like Mr Leeson but, just
the same, there are hundreds of occasions every year when it would be to your advantage to
extract the truth from people who don’t want to tell it. Whatever job you do, your success
ultimately depends on your ability to sort out the good from the bad and to deal, effectively
and politely, with deception.

Economic advantages of the truth

COST OF LIES IN FRAUD

Fraud in the UK costs taxpayers billions each year. Banks write off over £20 billion annually
on loans they thought were good; credit card companies lose 4 per cent of turnover through
card abuse, identity theft and skimming; the cost of recovering from a bad employee is around
£50,000 per instance, and there are tens of thousands of them every year; companies lose
between 2 and 5 per cent of turnover as a result of fraud, and even more by relying on inac-
curate information. So what?

Principle: Never tell a lie, unless lying is one of your principles