Enforcement/Penalties

I'm going to keep showing how wrong the criminal enforcement of ethics laws is until there is at least some sign of movement away from it. This time I will do it by looking at two recent proceedings in which serious penalties are involved, one criminal, the other civil. The criminal penalties are about punishment, the civil penalties about strengthening the ethics program and sending important messages to other officials and employees.

Update: August 26, 2011 (see below)

At the same time there is talk of local government ethics reform in New York State, the new attorney general has his own plan for local government oversight. But it is all criminal in nature.

His idea is to place public integrity officers in all thirteen attorney general offices in the state, starting with Rochester. The new attorney general's predecessor, now...

On January 28, the New York State Bar Association issued a report on government ethics reform in New York State, which includes a section on local government ethics reform. The report points out the many inadequacies of...

Oklahoma's Open Meeting Act, which applies to local governments, ends with an unusual provision. That provision is the only provision in the act that deals with enforcement. It says that a willful violation of a provision is a misdemeanor, and that someone guilty of a violation may be fined up to $500 and/or imprisoned in a county jail for up to one year.

Is there any other nation in the world that would...

Local governments cannot afford to do the level of due diligence that corporate compliance offices do on a regular basis. But it is worth looking at how corporate compliance offices and corporate executives deal with other entities that are found to be involved in unethical activities. A report just out from Deloitte, ...

Update: February 10, 2011 (see below)

Trenton's city attorney and mayor have been going through an elaborate dance in the last week, since the city attorney decided to void a contract between the city and a law firm that made a large contribution to a PAC that supported the new mayor's candidacy. The city attorney's decision was made pursuant to a 2006 Trenton pay-to-...