Bert Osborne is currently assigned as an accountant in the Payroll Department of the Bay Bridge Company. One of his duties is the processing of engineering time reports, which are used to charge engineering time related overhead costs to maintenance jobs performed within the Bay Bridge plant. Each plant engineer is assigned a group of maintenance jobs for which she or he is responsible. Engineers are evaluated in part based on their ability to hold each maintenance job within budgeted limits. Furthermore, any job overrun in excess of 10% requires a time-consuming, detailed, written explanation to the plant manger.
Osborne's friend, Porter Wallace, is an engineer at Bay Bridge Company. Parts of his duties involve the responsibility for several maintenance jobs, with several of these jobs in process at any given time.
Wallace is aware that one of his jobs is going to entail a substantial overrun. He has approached his Payroll Department friend, Bert Osborne, and asked that Bert shift sufficient charges from the overrun job to jobs that are well within the budget. These latter jobs are also Wallace's responsibility, so that no other engineer's maintenance job costs are affected.
Required:
Which of the 15 responsibilities in the Standards of Ethical Conduct presented in Chapter 1 apply to Osborne's situation?