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a chance to not only learn from the transgression, but it also provides the incentive to never risk losing that respected person’s trust again. At least it did for me.
    Ignoring the advice of her deputy, Mayor Allison laid out, in specific detail, how I would rectify my situation. She expected me to go over all my time sheets and give her the best estimate of what I stole from the taxpayers.
    â€œI’m trusting that you’re going to do it with every bit of honesty you have in your body,” she said. “And when we figure it out, we’re going to calculate what it is in hours, and you’re going to work off those hours. You’re going to give this time back to the city. In essence, by the end of the day, you will not have stolen from the city.”
    And that’s exactly what I did—calculated those hours to the minute and worked all of them off—and then some. When I paid back the money, there was no patting me on the back. Mayor Allison simply acknowledged that I had lived up to her expectations.
    And that was more than good enough for me.
    After she described how I would pay the city back, the mayor added a final caveat:
    â€œTavis, I think you’re going to learn a lesson from this.”
    She was more than right. I learned a life lesson I’ll never forget.
    A Culture of Cheaters
    Today’s headlines are filled with news of cheaters: Former investment adviser Bernard “Bernie” Madoff, sentenced to 150 years in prison for bilking investors out of billions through a massive Ponzi scheme; the collective black eye Major League Baseball received after numerous media reports exposed the extent of performance-enhancing steroid use; city officials in Bell, a small southern California town, arrested and charged with misappropriating more than $5 million in city money for their personal use.
    One of the reasons I’m such a stickler for accountability is because I know what it means to violate the public trust. Although I list theft of taxpayer money among the most egregious offenses, I recognize the common denominator among ripping off voters, stealing from investors, and using steroids—they are all acts of betrayal. Just as I had disappointed Mayor Allison and the citizens of Bloomington, these individuals betrayed dozens, hundreds, even thousands who trusted and respected them.
    These examples are but a few high-profile cases of cheating. Society is filled with so many other more pedestrian examples: executives who fudge their educational credentials or work records on résumés just to appear more experienced and successful; students who plagiarize work from the Internet for better grades; employees who play computer games or chat online or on cell phones while on the company’s dime.
    We rationalize these acts, tell ourselves it’s a temporary means to an end, or it’s really no big deal. In actuality, it is. Be it padding our résumés or time sheets, using company computers for personal reasons, or stealing pens or paper towels from work, it reinforces a culture of disrespect and destroys the meaning of personal integrity.
    I remember a Slate.com article I read in 2002 about a whole slew of executives caught that year lying about their educational achievements. These men represented companies like Bausch & Lomb, Veritas Software, and Salomon Smith Barney. According to William Baker, a contributor for the CBS Interactive Business Network, “Stretching in résumés—fiddling with dates of employment to hide long layoffs; inflating the magnitude of your job responsibilities—is prevalent. A common figure thrown about in studies and by human resources professionals is that 40 percent of résumés are not exactly on the level.”
    What does all this mean? Well, it means “the little white lies”—the fudging and skimming and skirting of responsibilities—are now part of our work culture. It means there are