Offering or Accepting Gifts:

Gifts from clients, customers, suppliers, and bidders are a particularly sticky issue because they are sometimes part of accepted practice, and it is expected that token gifts may be exchanged. You must, however, avoid selecting a bidder based on anything other than the bidder’s professional competence, product quality, or price. Accepting a “gift” could give a bidder an unfair advantage, so it’s important for you to know what the standard is for your situation.

How big a gift is too big? Some businesses are quite explicit about setting a threshold value, perhaps $10 or $25, allowing coffee mugs, pens, calendars, and memo pads (all with the provider’s company logo, of course), but not Caribbean cruises, cases of bourbon, or vacation weekends at a skiing or golf resort. Presumably, a gift becomes a bribe when it affects your professional judgment.

Incidentally, ethicists make a distinction between bribery (payment to get an unfair advantage) and extortion (payment to get what you should receive anyway). The former is unethical, while the latter is not, at least for the payer of extortion.

Here is an ethics module on political contributions. In this situation, an engineer is asked to contribute to the political campaign of a local official who will have some decision -making authority on the engineer’s business.

Here is an ethics module on the acceptance of free registration for a seminar. In this case, Terry must decide whether to attend an educational seminar sponsored by a potential vendor. He is not sure whether attending the free seminar, along with a buffet lunch and a cocktail reception, will affect his future professional purchases.

For further reading, consider this ethics module on the acceptance of gifts. It contains an extensive discussion on the issue of gift-giving and the question of when a gift becomes a bribe.