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It&#39;s a moment most of us will experience at some point throughout our careers. The point where, when seeking a new position, you get through the interview stage and all the way to the point where the company wants to make you an offer. And the question comes: &quot;What&#39;s your current/most recent salary?&quot; While there are many ways to avoid answering this question until you&#39;ve had a chance to establish a rapport with the company, at some point most interviewees give in and blurt out a number.&lt;p&gt;It can be tempting, as you’re pondering the answer in your head, to tack a little extra on to the figure you were recently/are currently making. After all, the offer stage is a negotiation, so it can&#39;t hurt to give yourself a little extra leverage, right?&lt;p&gt;That&#39;s clearly what Ellen O&#39;Hara, a New York-based book editor thought when she penned a post on the value of little white lies in salary negotiations for Daily Worth. &lt;p&gt;Reporting that she&#39;d lied about her current salary in a job interview and then held out for more when given an offer that merely matched the inflated figure she&#39;d given, O&#39;Hara offered the following &quot;lesson&quot; from her experience:&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&quot;Needless to say, I learned that it pays, literally, to be strong and assertive when it comes to money. My only regret is that I’d been such a wimp about it for so long.&quot;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, not being &quot;a wimp&quot; may have placed O&#39;Hara on the wrong side of the law: the post attracted a significant amount of attention for the ethical dilemma it raised, and among the responses was advice from HR professionals that suggested candidates have a legal obligation to tell the truth when divulging salary information (if, of course, they choose to divulge that information at all).&lt;p&gt; (The Daily Worth post—and the subsequent furor it generated—came to our attention via The New York Times, by the way.) &lt;p&gt;The end result in this case doesn&#39;t seem to have affected anyone too adversely: there have been no reports of O&#39;Hara getting into any kind of legal fix (at least as far as we&#39;re aware at this point), and the worst of it seems to have been that the Daily Worth retracted the post—leading the &lt;i&gt;Times&lt;/i&gt; to comment on it, and presumably drive its traffic numbers through the roof. Not the worst deal imaginable&lt;p&gt;It does raise an interesting ethical dilemma, though. Assuming that the worst that would happen if you were caught inflating your salary is that you wouldn’t be offered a job, would you take the risk? And, if you would, what would it take to put you off? Perhaps more importantly: do we concentrate too much on salary in job negotiations, instead of worrying about things like the fit between the person and the workplace?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;b&gt;--Posted by Phil Stott, Vault.com&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/i&gt;

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