Coors -- which recently acquired Molson Inc., adding employees from Canada and Brazil -- has gradually made improvements to its ethics training since 1990, when Warren Malmquist, current director of audit services at the brewing company, joined the firm.

The company's 15,000 employees will complete the firm's ethics training this summer, which focuses on "prevention" rather than "investigation," according to Malmquist.*

The program includes a user-friendly code of conduct, detailed policies, interactive online courses, ethics leadership training, a decision map and a help line. The firm receives about 25 calls to its help line each quarter, and every one is investigated.

In 2002, the company hired ethics firm Working Values and created a Web-based ethics training module. New hires are required to complete the course within 90 days, and existing employees must take a refresher course periodically.

The training module "helps understand ethical decision-making in the context of Coors' values and business objectives," explained David Gebler, president of Working Values.

"In this post-Sarbanes environment Coors has a special advantage in how it structured its program," said Gebler. "Unlike many companies, Coors' ethics and compliance program was developed by the company's head of Audit, Warren Malmquist. Warren understood that the success of the entire audit program was dependent on having the proper tone at the top, and this philosophy has been reflected in the way the program has been deployed. The support of audit has given the program a sense of importance and centrality since it links ethics so closely with the integrity of the financial statements."

Gebler said an excellent example of this integration is the manager training developed for Coors' finance organization that combined the philosophy of the ethics program with the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley. The training for managers focused on the need to look for warning signs that employees were being pressured or otherwise being subjected to influences that could be signs of unethical activity.

The integration of cultural risks with internal controls could only succeed at an organization that understood the role ethics plays in its financial success, said Gebler.

SmartPros is the parent company of Working Values Ltd.

*Source: Workforce