Cover your ass

Cover Your Ass (CYA) or Cover Your Own Ass (CYOA) describes professional and organizational practices that serve to protect oneself from legal and administrative penalties, criticism, or other punitive measures. The polite explanation of the abbreviation is "consider yourself accountable".

Common CYA Practices

• Medicine - Physicians who order tests that may not be necessary but insulate them from future medical malpractice suits if the patient fails to recover, or if an illness is misdiagnosed.
• Business - Managers who hold unnecessary meetings, or send memos and emails solely to create a record. This can create a strongly risk averse corporate culture.
• Banking - compliance officers who may know that certain financial transactions are dubious, i.e., that money laundering and terrorist financing will inevitably occur regardless of the amount of regulatory structures put in place,^[1][2] but who comply with all the regulatory requirements, and thus absolve themselves from future liability.
• Journalists - The term's use is also reasonably widespread among journalists^[3]
• Structural engineers.
• Internet Sites - Adult websites, among others, who ask the viewer to certify they are of legal age: The viewer's answer is unverifiable, but the website authors can't be held responsible for an underage user's lying about their age.
• Law Enforcement - Officers sometimes write CYA on their citation books as a reminder to protect themselves from both legal and physical danger.

As an example, just before the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the final launch approval by Morton Thiokol (the maker of the solid rocket boosters used during the launch) contained the following warning: "Information on this page was prepared to support an oral presentation and cannot be considered complete without the oral discussion". This warning, which was present even though the information was sent by fax, has been labelled as a CYA notice.^[4]

See also

• Command responsibility
• Due diligence

Footnotes and citations

1. ^ The Economist, Financing terrorism: Looking in the wrong places. 20 October 2005
2. ^ Jeffrey Robinson. Brown's war just doesn't add up: you can't kill terrorists with a calculator. The Times. 14 February 2006.
3. ^ Joe Grimm. Newsroom politics: Cover your ass.
4. ^ Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations. Graphics Press, 1997. pp 26–53.