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- Litigation
Spotlight
- By Stephanie Mitchell,
CompassPoint
Investigations
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- On Sunday, December 16, 2007
the Pacific Northwest Association of Investigators (PNAI)
released a statement clarifying the recent pretexting
indictments of ten workers at BNT Investigations of Belfair,
Washington.
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- As some of you know, these
workers were indicted by a Seattle federal grand jury for
creating a scheme to illegally obtain confidential
information on more than 12,000 citizens across the country.
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- All the recent press
releases identified three of the defendants in this case as
“Private Investigators”. However, after PNAI conducted an
investigation on the matter, they found that the three
owners or employees of BNT Investigations did NOT properly
maintain their licensing requirements in the State of
Washington. Therefore, to call them private investigators
is just not fitting. For more information about this release
use the following link: URL:
http://www.pnai.com
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- When I read about these
types of people I like to refer back to Scott Harrell’s
article on Ethics. I will share an excerpt…
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- “Ethics is acting with an
awareness of the need for complying with rules, such as the
laws of the land, the customs and expectations of the
community, the principles of morality, the policies of the
organization and such general concerns as the needs of
others and fairness. Ethics gives us a model with which to
make decisions and a method to evaluate other people’s
behavior as well. It is this concept of judging others that
ethics becomes the foundation for professional conduct and
therefore, inseparable from our profession.
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- As Private Investigators, we
have a framework by which we can evaluate our choices.
Primarily, we have various federal and state regulations and
rules that restrict our choices. In the absence of these
laws, we should then apply “common sense” by asking
ourselves a few simple questions in an effort to arrive at
the best answer:
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What are the
options?
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What are the
issues?
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What are the
consequences?
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- Every decision we make has
its own set of consequences. When we make ethical decisions
we can expect the results are typically positive, but when
we make poor errors in judgment we should expect negative
repercussions. Remember that when we chose to become
private investigators we accepted the responsibility to bear
very specific obligations, which include the precepts of
truth, justice and above all else, integrity.”
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- For more information about
this article use the following link:
- URL:
http://www.compasspointpi.com/ethics.htm
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