Who can doubt that a flagrant disregard for honesty, the rule of law and the public interest has afflicted global politics in recent years? It’s a disease infecting other institutions as well, including business. Integrity is the essential foundation of society. People find it difficult to trust officials and institutions that lack it, and a loss of trust makes economic growth difficult and effective governance nearly impossible. In 1998, billionaire investor Warren Buffet told students at the University of Florida: “We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you’re going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.” Unfortunately, many of those who lack integrity are downright smart, or at least smart enough to convince others that they are. Examples abound. American Elizabeth Holmes, was found guilty in January on four federal charges of defrauding investors after the collapse of Theranos, the US blood-testing company she founded. The company’s board members once included such luminaries as former US Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and US Secretaries of Defense James Mattis and William Perry. Among its investors were media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and Riley Bechtel, chairman of the engineering giant that bears his name. Board members and investors sometimes make big mistakes, but Theranos was, above all, a failure of integrity. According to federal prosecutors, the company was built on a scaffolding of lies. A lesser-known, but an even more grandiose, scheme involves the Dubai-based private-equity firm Abraaj, which had $14 billion (SR53 billion) under management when it collapsed in 2018. Founder Arif Naqvi was fined $136 million on Jan. 28 and banned by the Dubai Financial Services Authority “for serious failings” in his duty of care to investors. He’s currently trying to resist extradition to the US. Just a year earlier, Naqvi was telling assembled leaders at a New York forum: “Is there a trade-off between doing good and making money? There’s no trade-off. You can do both.” Lauded by the media, praised by the world’s elite, and with funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Naqvi, too, was lying, said regulators. In the Naqvi case, however, the boss is not the only one whose integrity is in question. The auditing firm KPMG, which, according to the Financial Times, “had exonerated (Abraaj) just a few weeks after the scandal broke,” also had a role to play. KPMG is hardly alone. Many other trusted firms did not fully meet their responsibilities to both customers and the public. In 2020, Deloitte, the world’s largest audit firm, was slapped with a record fine and “severely reprimanded for failings in its audits of the software company Autonomy,” according to the Guardian. PwC, the second-largest such firm, was fined $625 million in 2019, “as a result of a long-running accounting fraud that caused the 2009 failure of Colonial Bank.” It’s important to remember that while the Bernie Madoffs of this world will always be with us, the situation is not hopeless. Demanding integrity from auditors, attorneys, corporate compliance officers and other gatekeepers through proper training, public pressure, and better government regulation is the best defense. We should have zero tolerance for guardians who lie and cheat. Asked several years ago to define “integrity” for government officials, I came up with three simple rules: Tell the truth, obey the law and avoid conflicts by placing the interests of the public above one’s own. The private sector, too, should uphold these ethical standards through diligence and vigilance. • James K. Glassman, a former senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, served as US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs from 2008 to 2009. Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point-of-view