Examples Of Resistance To Accountability

Resistance to accountability is inevitable as many parties stand to lose from it. Apart from unavoidability, there exist unswerving insecurities, why people oppose accountability. The primary reason people resist accountability is that if it appears as reducing remunerations, entitlements, or privileges, individuals will perhaps resist it. On the other hand, it’s most likely that people impartially want to maintain the status quo in order to keep their fraudulent activities undetected.
An experience of resistance to change occurred during my volunteer work as the executive director of a certain foundation (name withheld) in Nairobi. The foundation was an indigenous organization supporting the education of poor children in the Nairobi slum.
Historically, the foundation’s executive director was the primary fundraiser. In other words, the director alone had direct access to funds and personal relationships with donors. The first weakness we noticed as a red flag was the fact that the director alone was responsible for signing cheques and reconciling the account of the organization. Had management been checking the reconciliations and signing of cheques each month as required, the red flag would have been obvious. Nevertheless, we discovered that monthly reconciliations were inaccessible for at least the last six months, and the management was unaware these reconciliations were never being undertaken. Conversely, had management followed their own procedure of inspecting the monthly reconciliation on a timely basis, they would have been aware of the missing reconciliations. The second red flag detected was that a series of reprinted cheque numbers ran significantly out of sequence. Ordinarily, what had happened here was that we noticed series of cheques inappropriately signed out by the director, but never countersigned by the receiving agency. Notwithstanding, the director was able to keep about 100 reprinted cheques for himself. An additional red flag detected was the change in lifestyle of the director. Accordingly, this occurred in procurements
The question surfaced whether this foundation was serving the purpose merit for a tax-exempt organization. Moreover, joint investigation efforts found rampant mismanagement and accused the former director of consistent misappropriation of funds as well as misrepresentation of the success of its missions. As a result, his leadership style led to more common ethical problems involving gray areas in activities that are on the peripheries of fraud, misallocation of resources, or inadequate accountability and transparency. One surprising attitude I noticed within the staff was their inability to criticize the mismanagement and the malfeasance behaviors of the executive director. There exist two reasons why members of the staff were resilient to raise questions. First, there emanates a conflict of interest that model this attitude. For example, the executive director sat on the board as a competitor and a tyrant. For this reason, staff members were afraid to lose the financial benefits through this autocrat. Secondly, his authoritarian style of leadership became antagonistic, intimidating, aggressive, and unswervingly inhumane to the staff. For instance, there happened to be staff members who expressed fear of retribution. Specifically, the greatest bewilderment and recalcitrant problems I noticed was the staffs’ resistance to report. The obvious reason for this