Story highlights Kara Alaimo: Firm said it was taking full responsibility for wrong envelope at Oscars

She says decision to name responsible employee publicly was attempt to shift blame

Kara Alaimo, an assistant professor of public relations at Hofstra University, is the author of "Pitch, Tweet, or Engage on the Street: How to Practice Global Public Relations and Strategic Communication." She was spokeswoman for international affairs in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration. Follow her on Twitter @karaalaimo. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

(CNN) On Monday night, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a statement claiming to take "full responsibility" for Sunday evening's Oscar screw-up in which a staffer gave the wrong envelope to Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who falsely announced that "La La Land" had won the Academy Award for best picture. But that isn't exactly what PricewaterhouseCoopers was doing.

Kara Alaimo

The firm also took the unusual step of naming the employee responsible for the fiasco: managing partner Brian Cullinan. It also emerged that Cullinan had tweeted a photo of the actress Emma Stone backstage just before the mix-up. The decision to name him publicly will be a disaster for both PricewaterhouseCoopers and Cullinan.

First, the move reflects terribly on PricewaterhouseCoopers. Publicly naming Cullinan looks like an attempt to deflect blame. Yes, Cullinan apparently made the mistake. But organizations are responsible for what their employees do. PricewaterhouseCoopers should have had error-proof processes in place to ensure that the (true) Academy Award winners were announced. Clearly, it didn't.

Lots of chief executives try to make excuses for crises by blaming their staffers. But it doesn't work. For example, after Wells Fargo owned up to 2 million accounts that weren't authorized by customers, the bank tried to blame staffers by firing 5,300 workers, many of them at low levels, and just one area president. But eventually, its chief executive had to take responsibility by stepping down.

That's because people believe companies are accountable for what their people do.

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