Lane has been approached by Casey Henderson, a former colleague who worked with Lane when they were both employed by a public accounting firm. Henderson has recently started his own firm, Henderson Benchmarking Associates, which ­collects and sells data on industry benchmarks. He offers to provide Lane with benchmarks for the outdoor furniture industry free of charge if she will provide him with the past three years of Outdoor Living’s standard and actual costs. Henderson explains that this is how he obtains most of his firm’s benchmarking data. Lane always has a difficult time with the standard- setting process and believes that the benchmark data would be very useful.

Requirements

1. Use the IMA’s ethical guidelines (www.imanet.org/ PDFs/ Statement% 20 www.imanet.org/PDFs/Statement%20 of% 20Ethics_ web.pdf) to identify the ethical dilemma.

2. Identify the relevant factors in the situation, and suggest what Lane should ­recommend to the controller.