For many local government employees, gratuities are the principal way in which an ethics code affects them, because many ethics code prohibit gratuities. But are they really a government ethics issue? In other words, does a government employee, say a sanitation worker, have a conflict or create an appearance of impropriety by accepting a tip from a citizen for whom he has done routine work?

The Missouri Ethics Commission has put up a nice slideshow-with-audio presentation on the many changes made to its ethics and campaign finance laws in Senate Bill 844 (it used Adobe Presenter software, but there are likely other alternatives). It's a good way to do reform-specific training.

But, as the presentation states, it is incomplete. In fact, of the four new provisions I focused on in a recent blog post, only two of them are mentioned in the presentation. De novo judicial review of EC decisions is one provision not mentioned. The other, although important, is specific to EC members and staff.

The principal problem with getting one's ethics from one's organization is that, according to Bailey, “Organizations seem to have a poorly developed sense of right and wrong. Expediency all too often comes out ahead of morality. Organizations and institutions are supposed to be the guardians of trust and fair dealing, but often there is no one to guard the guardians and — self interest being a prime mover — they look after their own good rather than the public good. ... The lack of moral sensibility lies in the leaders and owners, who put their advantage ahead of the common good ... behind a screen of respectability, of professed concern for the public good. Everywhere there is a major presentational effort either to deny self-interested behavior or to redefine it as altruism."

What you can see from reading this anthropologist, who studies all sorts of organizations in countries around the world, is that what occurs in local governments in the U.S. is no different. The principal thing that is different is that local government officials owe their fiduciary duties not to owners, or to numerous, dispersed stockholders who change frequently, but to the members of the community they live in.

"The worst thing you can do is read the [ethics] law like a lawyer and look for loopholes."

—Richard H. A. Washburn, training manager with the New York State Commission on Public Integrity in a training session with St. Lawrence County's new ethics board and other officials, according to an article in this week's Watertown Daily Times.

Washburn also told the reporter, "I tried to instill to them that it's to their benefit to have someone objective to ask and get an honest answer."

In The Kingdom of Individuals (Cornell University Press, 1993), F. G. Bailey's principal concern is what he calls svejks (pronounced "shvikes"), that is, individuals in organizations who put their personal, but not usually financial interests ahead of the organization, and yet act as if they are loyal to the organization, using its proclaimed values to defend their actions. This is not the sort of conflict of interest that is ordinarily dealt with in government ethics. But what the author says about the conflicts of interest in organizations, including governments, is valuable, and often fascinating.

So in the next few blog posts, I will riff on ideas raised in this book.

It is troubling that legislators insist that legislative immunity protects them in order that they may represent their constituents, and yet legislative bodies rarely have rules to ensure that their members represent their constituents by showing up to debate and vote.

The result is that some legislators, at every level, do not adequately represent their constituents by showing up to work. And often voters do not know. This may not be something that can be enforced by a local government ethics program, but it is certainly a conflict of interest issue. And the absence of rules, and of public responses by legislators to abuses, is an indication of a poor ethics environment.