At the risk of sounding sarcastic, it might be beneficial to read more books. It’s not hard to think something up. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader. 
The King of Soup: What the hell?!
A-fucking-men.
Teachers need to realize that not only can students buy papers online, but that you can pretty much Google-cut-and-paste entire research papers now. While there’s little or nothing you can do about the former, you can always take a particular phrase in a term paper and toss it into Google – chances are if they ripped it off of Google, you can find their entire paper online.
And there should be a ultralow tolerance policy in any case of plagiarism. First offense = F for the paper, second offense = automatic explusion.
As a TA, I once gave two (college-level) students zeros for handing in copied homework and was chastised by the professor for being excessively harsh. That’s exactly the wrong attitude. (The person copying had thinner handwriting than the person copied, and the assignment was copied line-for-line. As a result, the copied paper used only the left 2/3 of the paper. :rolleyes: )
I’m an engineer - I don’t read books without pictures (or at least charts). 
There are all kinds of reasons that could be excusable if she’d come to me at any time before she submitted that document. Once the client has her (well, someone else’s, really) work in hand, though, the bar for a second chance is set awfully high. I don’t know, undiagnosed mental health problems for which she’ll be receiving treatment in the future?
I’m curious.
I suppose if she came to me and said, “They were holding my family hostage, and promised to kill them unless I submitted this phony work,” that would qualify.
But if you’re talking about plausible events? Not so much.
Give me an example, please.
From one employer to another, this was an easy decision to make. Yeah, it is hard to fire a person for any circumstance, but this decision is clear cut since a level of trust has been broken, financial loss recognized, and is rarely if not impossible to regain.
IANAL (so Bricker, you can correct me on this), but doing something illegal for monetary gain is criminal itself since it requires two actions, which means that intent was premeditation involved in order to have financial gain. That is usually considered Gross Misconduct (with few exceptions) which is a good guideline for termination of any employee, at any level.
I’ve never been a boss but I worked freelance for about 10 years, in situations comparable to the woman Bricker fired.
I’ve always known that embarrasing my boss to his clients was the fastest way to get fired. The second fastest way to get fired is to bill for stuff I didn’t do. Costing my boss extra money and delaying the project three weeks? Big-time fired.
And I know that it’s a small world too. If I did all that and got fired, I know that word would pretty quickly get around. The production houses I worked for all know each other and they meet all the time. They gossip like old hens.
I knew all that the first day I started working and I didn’t need a specific employee handbook to tell me.
I guess if I was the boss and an employee did all that I might possbily give her a second chance on a different, less critical project. But no way would she keep her original job.
So kudos to you, Bricker, for seeing it through. Hopefully your firm can get your money back.
If the college has a policy on this (called “academic honesty,” usually), then the professor should adhere to it.
We generally follow the “one strike and you get an F on the paper; second strike and you’re out of here” rule on my campus, although I do know profs who have had people booted out on the first offense. The Student Life office and other administrative entities have no problem with that. “Out of here” means suspended for a year and then allowed to come back, but students can of course be expelled and not allowed back at all. Either way, it stays on the record.
How about a severe mental breakdown, making it impossible for her to distinguish the inappropriateness of her actions? Still not someone you’d really want handling an important case, but at least you could go for “Extended medical leave” instead of “shit-canned for lack of ethics.”
Ummm…
OK.
I’ve heard that, too. But if that artist had something stolen from him he might not be so philosophical. Plagairism is, to my mind, an unforgivable sin, especially among creative people. Money is just money, but one’s ideas are part of oneself.
I wouldn’t have hesitated to fire the cheat. Unless she was under the gun . . . literally . . . I don’t think plagairism can be excused.
Okay.
I was prodding and prying in an effort to get a better idea of what actually got done to whom, with marginal results. I thank Bricker for his patience. I brought up the possibility of criminality because I was thinking the situation might involve sensitive or protected information, but that appears not to be the case. A private contractor recycling old materials for a government client is certainly a potentially bad thing, and no doubt the employee was properly fired. It’s awfully embarrassing, I would imagine, for the client to pick up on that after the work had been approved and submitted, and I’d be a little surprised if there were no consequences for people higher up the chain of command. I don’t know much about the world of private consultants to government agencies: if there is money to be made telling the Department of Widgets how best to run the Department of Widgets, the taxpaying naif in me thinks there’s a step to be saved here, but that’s just me.
I’m still curious about what the procedure would have been had Bricker’s company, and not the client, discovered the misconduct. In my experience, the “remorse = sorrow at being caught” motif applies as easily to organizations as individuals. But I concede that the question is unanswerable.
The firing was entirely justified, no doubt about it. She attempted to defraud both your company and your client. It wasn’t a mistake or an error in judgement. It was an intentional violation of ethics and professionalism. She knew she was wrong when she did it. A company like yours is only as good as its reputation and if the client has reason to believe it can’t trust your work, the whole company suffers. Protecting the integrity of the work has to be your paramount concern.
I despise plagarism in academics and I fear that it leads exactly to this kind of thing in the workforce. Once cheaters become dependent on cheatiing they don’t know how to do it without cheating. I think colleges should have a zero tolerance policy for plagarism and that students should be expelled and have all prior awarded credit hours revoked after the first violation.
But that’s the thing. Among creative people, copying is stealing, and stealing is influence. (if you steal something, you appropriate it and make it your own; but if you copy it, it remains the full and visible property of the original - you add no additional value).
Having looked over a fair amount of legalistic boilerplate myself these past few years (mostly in the regulatory field), I must also chime in with the assertion that a lot of the “research” going on out there is of the cut-and-paste variety. The overwhelming sameness of it all is mind-numbing. I’ve also noticed this with leases, condo bylaws, zoning ordinances, liens, variences, invention disclosures, patents, it just goes on and on. I’m not saying Bricker’s erstwhile colleague was generating boilerplate, but either the same four people have produced the majority of the legalese out there, or it’s often very difficult to distinguish what is original, and what is recycled.
Four points:
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Bricker was entirely justified in firing this person. She lied, she damaged the relationship with the client, she tried to defraud the taxpayer, and she impugned the reputation of the firm.
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This work is paid for out of the public purse - your tax dollars at work - and a higher standard applies.
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There seems to be an undercurrent in this thread of pro-female sexism: the fired should be given greater leeway because she is a she; sorry but we live in an age of sexual equality and you can’t have it both ways.
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Can this really be the socialist proletariat of the SDMB sympathising with Bricker
As for forgiveness, I’ve got a couple questions.
First, Bricker, you’re the most thoughtful conservative Christian I know. I say that because I hope you’ll understand I’m not accusing you of hypocrisy when I ask you whether, and how, you view your actions within a Christian context. It’s genuinely not something I understand: I would think that Jesus’s “Cast the first stone” speech would make firing someone very difficult. Obviously, if his speech is taken to mean that we can never punish people for their actions, society has a hard time functioning; however, I wonder whether that constitutes a sufficient answer to his edict? If you feel like shedding light on how you see this, I’d appreciate it.
Second, if there is to be repenting (and here I’m no longer asking within a religious context), it seems to me that the most she can hope for is that your firm will give her a neutral reference for future employers. Do you know how your firm will respond, if she puts your name on a resume and someone calls?
Daniel
It occurs to me that if she’d simply said, “Boss, I’ve talked to many people, including X, Y, and Z; and it seems to me that this document of theirs pretty much nails it” and backed that up, her work might well have been accepted.
No, I highly disagree. If she was supposed to actually talk to people and find out how the department was ACTUALLY working, there is no boilerplate document that she could have found on the internet that was acceptable. The billing for work not done is a fireing offense in itself, but if I was the client, and the company in question presented reccomendations for change that were not based on our actions, I would do my best to make sure the firm did not get work with us again.
I have to say, this is a brilliant post. I couldn’t have said it better myself.