While the mercury is rising, the summer for me is coming to an end. The days remain long, but so does the time I'm spending in the office. So in my last days of watching sport for the season, I've been fascinated with the cricket walking debate: if you know you are out should you walk automatically or should you wait for the umpire's decision?
The debate centres on whether walking is the right and noble thing to do versus accepting an umpire's decision in your favour as evening the score for when you get a bad call.
A dominant point of view in the office is that in today's cricket world with its lucrative contracts and sponsorship deals, players are much less expected to walk. When the game was less mercenary, players could afford to be more noble. In a similar way, the stakes have become higher with reporting breaches of Australian financial services licences to ASIC.
Licensees are damned if they do and damned if they don't. In mid-2006, ASIC executive of compliance Jennifer O'Donnell said she would check the procedures of licensees who had not yet lodged a breach notification.
O'Donnell explained that breach reporting was an important part of the financial services regulatory framework, without which ASIC would find it more difficult to identify and rectify current and emerging problems. It's all well and good to report when the breach is minor, but if it is something that may be affecting your business earnings or ability to continue in business would the decision be different?
Expecting people to walk is a hard ask at any time, so it was a particularly clever move by the corporate watchdog to put in place the rule that a business without breaches would come under its scrutiny. Like the cricket shows, if there's no penalty for failing to walk when perhaps you should have, it's too tempting to stay put and fail to admit when you're wrong.
