1. As noted in this case, email messages generally have a "low expectation of privacy." What does that phrase mean and what implications does it have for business professionals?
2. What ethnical or professinal standards should auditors consider when writing email messages and when communicating on social media networks? What consequences may auditors face if they violate those stabdards?
3. Place yourself in Glory's position. How would you have communicated your decision to resign?
Internet Infamy The Internet, my fickle friend, my two-laced enemy, what would life be like without you? Where else can be anonymously anyone and yet, have no anonymity at all? Susan Schussler Historians disagree when the first email message caromed down the information superhighway, but there is no dispute that email was the Internet's first "killer app." Email quickly became the primary communication medium within the business world. By 2015, more than one-half of the 200 billion daily emails sent worldwide involved businesses. On a typical day, a business professional receives 88 emails and sends 34 Because of the nature of email, including its "low expectation of privacy," offhand statements made by corporate citizens that would have been quickly forgotten in the past now become forever memorialized in the digital netherworld. Even business icons such as Bill Gates have come to rue the seemingly indestructible and timeless nature of electronic messages During the course of the historic antitrust lawsuit that the U.S. Department of Justice filed against Microsoft, Gates insisted he was unaware of abusive business practices his company had used against its key competitors. Federal prosecutors retrieved emails Gates had sent to subordinates years earlier and then used his own words to refute that claim Similar to Gates, accountants, particularly those new to the profession, frequently experience "send button regret." In 2013, an accounting student at a large Midwestern university wrote an email to a female recruiter of a Big Four firm who he had met at a career fair. To help the recruiter remember him, the young man reminded her that he was the student who had sported a large "zit on his lip. * After dropping that crude crumb on the recruiter, the prospective employee asked her if the rigorous demands of an entry-level position with a Big Four firm would squash" his opportunity for romantic relationships when he entered public accounting. He went on to observe that although he "liked" money, "love" was much more important to him. Not only did the young man not receive a job offer from the recruiter's firm, the three job offers he had already received were reportedly rescinded after his awkward email went viral. Mischievous accounting graduates who land positions with Big Four firms quickly learn that high-tech pranks that might have been considered harmless fun in a college environment are deemed politically incorrect by their straight-laced, no-nonsense employers. A few years ago, the Dublin, Ireland, practice office of a Big Four firm suspended three male employees who had circulated via email photos of 13 recently hired female employees. The young men asked more than one dozen of their male colleagues to rank the women for the purpose of developing a top 10 list of the office's most attractive female new hires. The original recipients forwarded the email to other friends and acquaintances who, in turn, forwarded the message to their friends and acquaintances, and so on and so forth. As the email raced around the globe at an increasingly rapid pace, Internet miscreants began attaching increasingly disparaging statements regarding the contestants," comments that proved embarrassing for not only the young women but the accounting firm as well. Ironically, a female employee of another Big Four firm in Great Britain had circulated a similar email less than twelve months earlier. In this email, which also ricocheted around the globe at warp speed, "Holly" asked a group of her female co-workers to rate the men in their office by nine traits including "most likely to sleep his way to the top." The negative attention garnered by the email forced Holly to resign her position with the firm. After resigning, the naive young lady told a British newspaper, "It's a complete shock that one email could spread like this and who would think it could get so out of hand." * A young auditor employed by a Texas practice office of a Big Four firm can lay claim to writing one of the most legendary emails in the history of the accounting profession. In late 2013, "Glory" a fictitious name the young lady coined ostensibly to protect her privacy, decided she had spent quite enough time ticking and tying. So, she crafted a resignation letter that she then emailed to her soon-to-be former colleagues. In the email, Glory ripped the auditing discipline. "Auditing is a job for people who truly don't have other options and don't know what else they should be doing" * was among the grenades that Glory planted in her email. She also suggested that auditors spent most of their time collecting useless documentation" to fill up "useless" workpaper files that served no purpose. Oha ineleted purpose. Next, Glory began carpet bombing the individuals with whom she had worked. She insisted that her co-workers who claimed to "love" their jobs were "fake" and attempting to curry favor with their bosses. She accused one of her peers of repeatedly attempting to throw her "under the bus" and belittled another for talking incessantly about her cat: "Stories about your nasty cat are unbearable." An equal opportunity basher, Glory didn't spare the partners in her office. She ridiculed her co-workers for treating partners as if they're royalty" when, in fact, they were only "average Joes" who happened to have larger pockets than everyone else. Glory also slammed her office's mentoring program in which she had apparently been an unwilling participant. Glory's rant received so much attention that the media pestered her for interviews. In the one interview she granted, a reporter asked the former auditor how she was dealing with her Internet infamy and whether she felt any regret for her email. "When I pressed the send button I felt a sense of liberation .... No, I don't have any regrets .... I didn't really care about professionalism." * Glory did admit during the interview that she never had a strong interest in auditing and chose the field because her parents insisted that she pursue a professional career. She also confessed that caving into her parents' demands had been a mistake and that she was now "living for myself and ... doing things that I love to do and accounting isn't one of them." * Not surprisingly, many auditors and former auditors objected to Glory's observations in her resignation letter. For example, one individual who spent four years with the same Big Four firm that had employed Glory described that experience as being "unparalleled" * in terms of how it advanced and benefited her career
