You will have two weeks to prepare a 5 to 7 page paper (not including any cover sheet or bibliography page) exploring Integrity and Competence. Your paper should (1) briefly discuss what these attributes mean in a day-to-day professional environment and why they are important for leaders, (2) how these two attributes contribute to the Public trust in our work as government financial professionals, (3) what expectations exist whether from the profession (e.g. AICPA Code of Conduct) or users (e.g., adequate and meaningful disclosures) of our work concerning integrity and competence, (4) challenges (i.e., biases, attitudes, past experiences, lack of experience, etc.) that exist now (personal details should be omitted and general references are encouraged) in your life or that you foresee that can both help or undermine your integrity and/or competence, and (5) steps you can take in developing an action plan to increase your integrity and competence.

Your assigned Paper #1 should identify the framework and the core values you use to operate from day-to-day to help you understand why and how you might react to situations. Applying these values at work may look like this following situation; assume for a moment that someone brings you a mistake they made or a problem they see, you quickly realize that they may not have been required to tell you and might have successfully avoided responsibility for identifying the problem and reporting it. Now, ask yourself, do you really believe that you and the organization are better off knowing rather than not knowing about this problem or issue? Or do you instead wish that they had never brought it to your attention? So, we can either create a "safe space" for employees to bring mistakes, problems, and concerns or a (sub)culture or ethos of what I coin, "a culture of concealment."