Fiduciary responsibility

A fiduciary responsibility to stockholders, employees, and customers to meet the first two obligations at the lowest possible cost... 

Regardless of whether the costs of unnecessary and unproductive validation efforts represent a significant portion of a laboratory s annual expense or a small decimal of its budget, managers have a fiduciary responsibility to control costs. If that responsibility is not exercised patients costs ultimately rise, a portion of needy patients are financially excluded from a beneficial treatment, and investors who might otherwise have funded valuable research and development efforts put their money in an Internet stock instead. Cost control isn t just good business it s good altruistic policy as well. 

USP s Board of Trustees is elected for a 5-year term and has fiduciary responsibility for the organization. Larry L. Braden, R.Ph., is the Chairperson of the 2002-2003 USP Board. A complete list of Board members is... 

In consideration for enployment, a chemical engineer (or any enployee) accepts what are called fiduciary responsibilities. This means that trust has been placed in the engineer to act faithfully for the good of the firm This is a general legal principle and is covered in the AIChE code of ethics. 

Related to fiduciary responsibilities is the avoidance of conflicts of interest. The focus here is to avoid circumstances where you have, or appear to have, contradictory obligations. For exanple, if you own stock in a valve manufacturer, it would be a conflict of interest if you were to order valves from that conpany for your present enployer, if there were another supplier of equal-quality valves at a lower price. In general—and especially in government service, where the regulations are quite strict—one must avoid not only actual conflicts of interest but also apparent conflicts of interest. The test is that, if a reasonable person could reasonably assume there to be a conflict of interest, one has an apparent conflict of interest. 

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