Connectco. Case Study

Case Summary:

Joe Davis recently accepted the newly created position of Manager of Planning and Reporting at ConnectCo – The Canadian arm of a U.S. marketing and sales consulting practice. In the first few weeks, Davis found that the organization’s policies and procedures, including the accounting procedures relevant to the terms of the ConnectCo-Symbol contract and its subsequent amendments, were not well documented. Symbol Office Solutions (Symbol) was the company’s largest client, fetching 68 percent of ConnectCo’s revenue. After going through the contract and having the initial meeting with Chad MacDonald, VP and Relationship Manager for Symbol, Davis got an idea that Charlie Gallagher, VP of Canadian Operations, was not keeping others working with Symbol up to date on his commitments to the client. Davis calculated that ConnectCo owes Symbol $81000 for not fulfilling the “99%” criteria. When he presented the data to Gallagher and MacDonald, they asked him to run the numbers again taking out the training days for IAE. Although Davis was not convinced with Gallagher’s point of view, that – if an IAE was in training and they knew where they were going to put him then they should not have to pay for those days as ‘inactive’, he recalculated the numbers bringing them down to $54000.

Connecting all the dots from his meeting with Gallagher, call from Steve Puhl, advice of the controller, and response from Gallagher after his meeting with Puhl to go with the lowest cost, Davis established that Gallagher was wiggling around the terms of the contract and suspected that a lack of ethics, and worse, a culture of corruption, was pervasive in the organization.

According to my understanding of the situation Joe Davis was in, he should report the case and bring this matter into the notice of President and CEO of ConnectCo. This is backed by the reason that even after Steve Puhl made it clear that according to Amendment 2.0 ConnectCo will invoice Symbol for IAEs working the phones, without clearing things up Puhl, Gallagher asked Davis to go with the lowest cost. Also, when Davis tried taking his concerns to the controller of ConnectCo, he expected her to act as an impartial referee, but instead she advised him to get along with the case.

On the positive side Davis will be in the clear picture and when the President and the CEO gets to know about the unethical