I recently spoke with a friend who used to pick vegetables at
a vegetable garden when he was younger. At the vegetable garden, workers were
paid by the pound for some types of vegetables and by the bucket for other
types. He told me that many people would “accidentally” add a few rocks to
their buckets for the vegetables that were paid by the pound. He also said that
workers would stack the vegetables in the bottom of the bucket in a log cabin
style so as to use up as much space with the fewest amount of vegetables for
the vegetables that were paid by the bucket. My friend is an honest person, and
if he did participate in this behavior in the past, I doubt he would do so now. The story got me thinking about fraud in the business world and some of the
similarities we see in this type of rationalization.
