Mission creep is what happens when the original job starts to expand.
Our military forces, especially those on the ground in a foreign country, understand what mission creep is all about. Army Field Manual 03-07 notes that “deterring mission creep is difficult since civilian agencies and U.S. forces inherently desire to do more than is required, especially when faced with human suffering.”
The field manual also points out that mission creep, “can also derive from well-meaning but erroneous interpretation of law or regulation.”
While mission creep is most often the result of natural causes — sometimes our instinctive behavior, sometimes our imperfect knowledge — there is no doubt that it can be expensive. Our overseas missions, both strategic and humanitarian, always run the risk of costs considerably higher than planned, often because of mission creep.
Mission creep is also a very real economic force in business organizations right here at home. There are very few businesses that have attempted to solve a problem or bring a new product to market without feeling its effects. A programming project, for example, that starts out as a simple software fix can quickly morph into a major rewrite of the entire database. And new products often collect so many add-on features on their way to the production line that they price themselves out of the market.
Laws and regulations are not products and services, but they have an effect on our economy through their impact on costs and how markets work. And neither our legal system nor our regulatory apparatus has any immunity to mission creep.
The efforts by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to expand its role in the workplace are a current example of the desire to do more. The Commission’s enforcement guidance on “Unlawful Disparate Treatment of Workers with Caregiving Responsibilities” provides some insight into how well-meaning mission creep begins.
The guidance is in question-and-answer form, and one of the questions is whether caregivers are a protected group under federal statutes. The answer is “no” and that would seem to settle that issue. But then, in answer to another question, the commission goes on to say, “Unlawful disparate treatment of a caregiver also can arise under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 where an employer discriminates against a worker based on his or her association with an individual with a disability.”
Maybe this is a good thing, and maybe it isn’t. That is something for the Congress, not the commission nor an economic analyst, to decide. But it is certainly clear that the Americans with Disabilities Act is about the fair treatment of people with disabilities in the workplace. It has nothing to do with employees’ responsibilities outside the workplace. Expanding the employer’s responsibilities to people who are neither workers nor job applicants is a classic example of how mission creep begins. And it has the potential for a significant and expensive effect on the workplace and on our economy.
Another example of embryonic mission creep is involved in a legal case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The court recently heard arguments in a case, Stoneridge Investment Partners LLC v. Scientific-Atlanta Inc., in which stockholders sued two of the suppliers to a firm, Charter Communications, which had cooked its books to inflate its profits. (Four Charter Communications executives pleaded guilty to conspiracy.)
In this case the suppliers, Scientific-Atlanta and Motorola, had apparently charged artificially high prices for the goods they supplied to Charter Communications, and then returned the extra money in the form of purchased advertising. While this essentially nets out to zero financial impact, Charter used this to inflate its sales picture to investors.
The legal situation up until now has been that stockholders could not generally sue third parties for aiding and abetting fraud. But this case could change that, and open the door to stockholder lawsuits against a firm’s suppliers, creditors, accountants and legal advisers.
There is also an element of mission creep involved in the case. Securities laws were generally designed to give stockholders who were defrauded in some way to be compensated for their loss; the culpability of any others was a matter for prosecutors and regulators to deal with, not tort litigation. Depending on the court’s decision, that could change in a big way.
There is no doubt that Stoneridge Investment Partners LLC v. Scientific-Atlanta Inc. is an important case that will affect the way our financial system, and our economy, works. Like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s move to draw third parties into the work place, the case could change our economic structure and present us with some major unplanned costs.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes “Business 101” monthly for the Snohomish County Business Journal.
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