Should a company be responsible for integrity failures in its supply-chain?
That’s the question that comes to my mind when I read the latest news:
Seafood experts have suggested Subway may not be to blame if its tuna is in fact not tuna. “I don’t think a sandwich place would intentionally mislabel,” Dave Rudie, president of Catalina Offshore Products, told the Times. “They’re buying a can of tuna that says ‘tuna’. If there’s any fraud in this case, it happened at the cannery.”
Whether the vendor “says tuna” on a label is such an odd thing to pin this case on, given the vast majority of such claims have been proven fraudulent for a decade now.
…59% of tuna is not only mislabeled but is almost entirely compromised of a fish once banned by the FDA. Sushi restaurants were the worst offenders by far [75%].
In other words is it still a form of fraud to not know or validate integrity of a source but to sell it anyway, especially when sources are known to have very low integrity?
I think there’s a false assumption here, that “validate the integrity of a source” is a binary. The better question is: “how rigorously and in what ways do you validate the integrity of a source”? There’s all sorts of best practices in third-party risk management, and the whole discipline is waaay more difficult than validating the quality/integrity of what you do in-house, and a lot of people have a hard time with that.