"What does it take to bribe you?"

Someone actually asked me that once, during my years as an auditor: "What does it take to bribe you?" Fortunately I saw the smile and knew she was joking, but the question still took me by surprise. 

Let me give you a little context. I was at a startup back then, and we were working to get our initial certification to ISO 9001. Departments had been writing procedures for a couple of months, and we were just about to start our very first round of internal audits. I had walked over to Purchasing, to confirm the time for their interviews the next day. The woman I spoke to confirmed the time, but she was obviously very worried about being audited because she'd never been through it before and didn't know what to expect. So after she checked her calendar for when I was supposed to arrive, she giggled nervously and blurted out, "What does it take to bribe you?"

To be clear, I've never been seriously offered a bribe in exchange for a good audit report, and of course I wouldn't accept it if I were. For that matter, I've never worked with an auditor who explicitly asked for a bribe. All the same, I've heard stories. They are always vague about the details: "I heard from this guy I know that he once had an auditor who ...." But they were still troubling. One story I heard was about an auditor working for one of the big registrars (never named), who would let it be known before he arrived that at the Closing Meeting he expected to find a bottle of good Scotch hidden in a convenient place in the room so that he could stash it with his papers and laptop as he made ready to leave. And all I could do was to shake my head with incredulity: first, of course, that he would sell his professional judgement at all; but second, that he set the price so cheap. So at the same time that I was indignant he had asked for a bribe in the first place, I was also thinking, Really? One lousy bottle of Scotch? Is that all your integrity is worth?

I did once work with an auditor whose price appeared to be cheaper than that, though he never said it openly in so many words. He was an external auditor working for one of the registrars, and I'll call him "Moe" (which is nothing like his real name).At the time I was working for a different startup from the one I mentioned above, and we were going through our initial certification audit. Moe was the Co-auditor in a two-man audit team. During the first few interviews, Moe said very little and was generally pleasant. But then the audit team got to our warehouse. And out in the front was a big vending machine with cold soft drinks. Moe asked for a Coca-Cola. The Warehouse Manager explained that the company didn't own the machine, so he couldn't just reach in and give him one. But he added that of course Moe was free to buy his own drink, as long as he was careful not to spill it as he walked around.

Moe just shrugged and said, "Never mind." But from that moment, he began to write Nonconformities at a brisk pace. I think he wrote 30 in the Warehouse alone. One or two of those were perfectly valid, but many of them were just silly. Fortunately the Lead Auditor overruled him, throwing out the most vacuous ones and downgrading many of the others to Opportunities for Improvement. But we all saw the change in Moe's demeanor, and it all seemed to happen right around the time we didn't give him a free soft drink.

The next year we had Moe again, this time as the only auditor. We were partway through the first morning when Moe asked if he could have a Coca-Cola. This time I jumped up out of my chair, fed my own quarters into the machine, and brought him one. Moe was pleasant and cheerful for the rest of the audit. And in the end he gave us only two findings (both trivial to resolve).

Was this bribery? Nobody ever said anything explicitly about any quid pro quo. But the simple question of whether we gave him a free Coca-Cola seemed to make all the difference in how Moe approached the audit. Probably there's a better explanation; but when the audit was over my professional opinion of Moe was not very good. We kept the same registrar after that, but we got a new auditor. I never saw Moe again.

And of course that's how it works for anybody. People remember what you do; and if you are shady or unethical, clients will avoid you and opportunities will be steered somewhere else. Even if you don't count the massive damage to your own self-respect, the sullied reputation is a really big price to pay for a bottle of Scotch or a Coca-Cola. It's never worth it. Don't go there.

So what did I tell the nervous young woman from Purchasing? Fortunately I understood that she was joking, and that what she really meant was that she was worried and didn't know what to expect. So I smiled as warmly as I could and told her, "I'm a big sucker for a logical argument. If you can show me why the things you do make sense, that will carry you a long way right there." And that seemed to help.