Plenty of attention now being placed on Morgan Stanley with a wrongful termination suit affadavit lifting the lid on steamy email chats and the firm's chief technology officer Guy Chiarello putting pressure on tech vendors to get the best seats to mega-sports events and trying to get a one-day assignment as a Yankees bat boy.

The Information Week blog makes the excellent point that all this goes to how much grey there is in ethics, especially when you have gifts (read: bribes) masquerading as innocent entertainment. Ethicists say that when long-standing relationships are involved, the costs need to be borne by the individual not the company. In other words, you ban gifts.

It's likely to be more and more of an issue. Writing in The CEO Refresher, Dr Freda Bauer from the University of Phoenix says CEOs need to undertake several steps to create ethical organisations. These include:

1. Communicating a zero tolerance policy on all issues relating to unethical practices.
2. Incorporating ethics policies into new employee orientation and training programs with all employees signing a statement acknowledging the policy and the value of workplace ethics and practices.
3. Establishing a formal position in the company such as a Vice President of Ethics.
4. Setting up an ethics hotline
5. Running leadership training and development courses that focus on ethics and accountability.

Neil Lebovits from Ajilon has some other suggestions detailed in the Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal.

These include senior managers being open to people raising ethical concerns, treating all employees equally, creating a working group of employees from different levels to look at standards and policies, and gauge that against what goes on in the real world, and making ethics part of hiring where candidates would be asked how they would act when confronted with an ethical dilemma.

The key questions you have to ask when confronted with these dilemmas: am I doing the right thing by this company's owners, customers and partners, do I feel comfortable with it, can I justify it and can I live with it if it was plastered all over the front page of the newspaper or on the TV news bulletins.

All these suggestions have some good points but how many companies actually do this? Not many, because let's face it, ethics is not treated as a core competency. How do you make it a core competency? If you tied managers' salaries to ethics and made it part of the remuneration process, you would see the difference very quickly. The question remains: who is going to do that?

Thoughts?