I am the chief financial officer for a financial-services company, and I found our bookkeeper using the corporate charge card for her personal use.  The misappropriation was approximately $47,000 over a six-month period.  She forged a partner’s signature to acquire a card in her name.  We fired her, and she paid back the funds in exchange for our not pressing charges.  But I cannot get closure if she is not punished for this egregious betrayal. I recommended that we call her husband, as I think family humiliation would be punishment enough. Would this be ethical?  NAME WITHHELD,NEW YORK

Many readers will find this question ridiculous. You’re proposing to humiliate someone just to make yourself feel better. That might be satisfying. But ethical? We are supposed to judge a punishment by how well it fits the crime, not by how well it satisfies the injured party’s appetite for retribution.

That’s the civilized thing to say. In reality, we accommodate that appetite in many ways.

Victim-impact statements, delivered right before criminal sentencing, can accommodate it. Calls for the death penalty based on a family’s right for “closure” can, too. Punitive damages obviously do.

Now you’ve got your own appetite for revenge, and it’s no surprise, given how the bookkeeper’s actions reflect on you. It may not be an admirable quality, but vengefulness is fundamentally human. In fact, you’re probably no more vindictive than most, just more honest.

Had your company decided to press charges, the bookkeeper’s actions would have become a matter of public record. And her penalty might have been much harsher.

Your company chose not to press charges, however. Instead it handled the matter internally, deciding for itself what punishment was appropriate. Your bookkeeper apparently preferred that option, too; if not, she could have sought the protection of open legal proceedings. So some might say she left herself open for whatever penalty you might dream up.

Regardless, calling her husband would be unethical. Her professional life is your company’s business. The books she keeps are your company’s business. Her marriage is not. You hired her, not her family. Stay out of it.

I have to wonder, meanwhile, about a financial-services company that allows someone to steal and then to just stroll off to the next company to do it again. Moreover, I wonder why the response to a situation like this is ad hoc. If your company has no policy in place to deal with violations of professional responsibility, I wouldn’t want it handling my accounts.

You’re in a position of power there. Perhaps instead of dreaming up dramatically rich revenge fantasies, your energies would be better directed toward establishing a reliable, replicable ethics policy, so that the next time someone contemplates a stunt like the bookkeeper’s, she would know exactly what she is in for.

Now for the big question: How could her husband not yet know? 

To access the original column, go to:   [NYTimes, 7/3/11]