We offer a new theory as to why ethical people engage in corporate misconduct such as accounting fraud, rogue trading, and suppression of drug side-effects. Modelling ethics as other-regarding preferences we show all agents, however ethical, have an in-too-deep threshold. If private knowledge that an activity they have begun is harmful arrives after a threshold time then the agent will choose to hide this fact and continue the activity, knowingly harming third parties -- until publicly caught.