Ethics Transparency

Transparency is one of the most important elements of government ethics. And yet government ethics itself is often kept secret. Respect for the privacy of those investigated is given preference over the rights of residents to know what is going on. Ethics commissions often do not file annual reports and, when they are required to, the reports are rarely placed on a city's website. Ethics violations are considered embarrassments that should be swept under the rug, and ethics violators are considered bad apples, even when there are indications that their behavior is either common or is commonly accepted. Rarely are there public meetings or speeches about the state of a city's ethics, especially when there are no immediate scandals (and those scandals are usually criminal, not simply about conflicts of interest).

This is not the case with the World Bank, an organization that, like a city, funds or enters into many contracts and approves many developments. Its Department of Institutional Integrity website has detailed information, and even pictures, relating to its investigations of both the Bank's projects and its own staff. Its new 64-page report on Fiscal 2006 is available in PDF format. Businesses found to have violated the Bank's rules are barred from getting bank money.

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Should cities rethink how transparent their ethics programs are? It is true that the news media might take more information to mean more unethical conduct. But the more transparent an ethics program, the less unethical conduct there should be for the news media to talk about.

What other ways are there to make local government ethics programs more transparent? What are the problems such transparency creates? And how should these be balanced against one another?

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics