Bbb Unethical Behavior

6. Do you believe the BBB can be truly impartial given its financial dependence on businesses?

The problem with unethical practices is that a company itself is not the only one will suffer from the consequence of its illegal actions. Most of the time, there are customers who get victimized by these unethical practices as they put their trust and loyalty on businesses that they have patronized for so long. At the end of the day, all they can do is file their complaints and vent out their frustrations over the betrayal they experienced from their trusted businesses, but the damage remains permanent. The once excellent relationships are forever destroyed and victimized customers always carry with them the trauma and fear that they could be fooled again in the future.

Creating an adequate monitoring system not only protects the best interest of an organization but the consumer also. Furthermore, without these structured protections for the business and consumers, unethical behavior tends to flourish throughout an organization in several different forms. In the case of the Better Business Bureau, it appears that the proper protections were not in place to protect consumers or the organization should have updated its mission statement to account for the many consumer changes since the use of the internet globalized businesses. Furthermore, the leaders of BBB should have worked harder to ensure that employees and companies were punished for allowing his or her unethical behavior to tarnish the organization’s image.

The most efficient way for consumers to get what they want is through the ‘market’, not the government, but businesses have more power than their customers. Some businesses can and will use abuse this power and cheat and steal from consumers to make money. Because of this, the government regulates the behaviour of businesses to have a market economy that functions properly. These laws mainly protect consumers against; misleading/deceptive representations, unconscionable conduct, unfair contracts, and unsafe goods and/or services. To protect consumers, different legal and non-legal approaches have been taken.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) is tasked with writing and enforcing rules for financial entities to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive or otherwise harmful practices by such entities. A major area of focus for the CFPB is a robust and effective oversight of a financial institution’s third-party providers (vendors) to ensure consumers are not exposed to unnecessary risk of financial or personal harm.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was created in 1914 primarily as a way for the government to “trust bust” or apply regulations ensuring a free marketplace for U.S. consumers and business enterprises. In this regard, the FTC enforces antitrust viola- tions that could hamper consumer interests, as well as federal consumer protection laws against fraud, deception, and unfair business practices. The commission’s primary enforcement mechanism is the Bureau of Consumer Protection, which is divided into seven divisions: (1) enforcement, (2) advertising practices, (3) financial practices, (4) marketing practices, (5) planning and information, (6) consumer and business educa- tion programs, and (7) privacy and identity protection.21 As the federal

Units that are business connections must execute and perform according to written business connections agreements that is essentially required to maintain the privacy. Thus, when companies assures consumers they will safeguard their personal information, the Federal Trade Commission can and does take law enforcement action to make sure that companies live up these promises (Bird et al, 2010).

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is a well known self-regulatory trade association in the United States. Companies that adhere to self regulation standards meaning the business will exhibit best practices and social responsibility. The BBB creates self regulatory programs for its members and uses the internet, newspaper, and media to inform the public of businesses who have violated self regulatory rules. The BBB's membership dues are around $425. The BBB's purpose is to establish a place of trust between business and consumers, as well as, dispute and complaint resolution services, reliability reports, and arbitration.

The Better Business Bureau is believed to have a reputation of protecting consumers and businesses from fraudulent scammers and unreliable firms, there were several unethical occurrences and allegations that led consumers to feel otherwise towards a company that has the reputation of trust. According to the Ermongkonchai (2010) study, “the main reason of employee misconduct was identified with personal or financial gain” (Pg125). It appeared that the Better Business Bureau had several bouts of unethical misconduct that lead to a ruined reputation and questioning of the firm's values.

If you aren't in business, you may have no idea what the BBB is, but if you are, it is either something you love or are terrified of. The better business bureau is an organization that analyzes just about every single business that is in operation, regardless of how big or small they are. This gives other people an understanding of how reputable you are and whether or not they want to do business with you, which is why your score is incredibly important, despite whether you like the bureau or not. If you have shady business practices, engage in any sort of illegal activity that gets reported, or flat out do not do good business, your BBB score is going to suffer and anyone that wants to find that information is going to be able to find it. When business deals are made between several companies, the first thing they are going to do is look up their BBB score to size them up. A lot of places won't even talk to you if you have a low BBB score, which can be a great thing and can be a bad thing at the same time.

Businesses of today, are under no obligation or commitment to seek BBB accreditation, and some businesses are not accredited because they have not sought BBB accreditation, which may cause problems for the business in the future. To be accepted or accredited by the Better Business Bureau, a business must take the time to apply for accreditation and it is at this point that business meets accreditation standards. This will include a commitment to make a good faith effort to resolve many of the customer’s complaints. Better Business Bureau must pay a fee for accreditation review/ monitoring and also for the support of BBB services to the general public. The Ratings that Better Business Bureau provides is a key element to protect business

While the Better Business Bureau is set into place to set ethical guidelines and standards for companies to follow and customers to benefit from, this does not prevent unethical and dishonest actions from happening. Similar to the Red Cross Foundation, it appears that when organizations have many or several local chapters it makes it extremely difficult to monitor them through their everyday functions. I do not feel that the Better Business Bureau is effective in ensuring that companies behave ethically to protect the consumer, due to the fact that many organizations have memberships with the company. I do feel like this skews the ratings and leaves an excessive amount of room for error and unethical mismanagement.In my opinion, it seems rather

They only have one complaint within the last three years and it was regarding an advertising and sales issue. Additionally, the BBB does not show any government actions involving their marketplace conduct, nor do they have any reports of them using any type of deceptive marketing tactics.

The first ethical issue I discovered while researching the Bounce Corporation scenario is the company’s willingness to prey on individuals that are fascinated by certain video games. One primary focus of a business is to make profits off the sales of their products. But when businesses single out consumers that exhibit symptoms similar to compulsive gamblers that organization displays unethical practices. The Bounce Corporation uses unfair business transactions to solicit individuals that possess uncontrolled desires to play social networking games and will play money to satisfy their obsession. Stakeholders should enforce standards that ensure supervisors conduct business dealings that uphold good ethical standards (Ferrell, Fraedrich,

Governing boards must empower consumers with needed tools to make safer business decisions. If tools are given to the consumer to protect their purchases from car makers, consumers would more comfortably recover from product issues and continue purchasing. For some consumers, the impact of the VW deception will cause loss of funds,