A project has been opened to write the proposal to submit to the government customer for the work described in their RFP$.$ The project manager who has been assigned to this proposal project has assigned you to write the quality management plan that is to be included in the technical proposal. The project manager has authorized you to charge eight hours of labor $($equivalent to one staff day$)$ to the bid and proposal $($B&P$)$ charge number for this project.

However, your write$-$up of the quality plan and its edits and revisions actually took you a total of $12\mathrm{.}5$ hours for your individual contributions, $4\mathrm{.}5$ hours more than you were allowed.

The project manager told you that money is tight on the proposal and you cannot charge the additional $4\mathrm{.}5$ hours to this project. He told you he didn$$t care how you charged the time $$ to another project or even to your own leave time $$as long as you didn$$t use the B&P charge number. He further told you that if you do charge all $12\mathrm{.}5$ hours of this time to the B&P number that he would not sign your time sheet.

Here is the problem you face. Bear in mind that you took your company$$s ethics training. By signing its completion, you have pledged to follow that training and your company is trusting you to keep that pledge. You know that it is unethical to charge time to a project that you did not work. It is unethical to charge work to your leave time. Besides that, you don$$t want to lose more than half a day of leave time. If you sign and submit your time sheet with any of the aforementioned misrepresentations of your time worked and if you are caught in an audit you will be terminated immediately $($because your bad ethics is now fraud$).$

So$,$ what do you do$?($BTW$,$ something like this actually happened to me once.$)$

You are asked to think of a possible course of action that resolves the ethical problem you are facing with minimal consequences and repercussions back to you. Post a short statement of your possible course of action out of this ethical dilemma. Please keep your statement to a few $($three or four$)$ sentences at most.

I hope that this is a thought$-$provoking issue. $($I also hope that this never happens to you.$)$ Enjoy.