Ethics Environments

A report on the relationship between New York's state university system (SUNY) and the SUNY Research Foundation (RF) was published yesterday. What makes it of interest to this blog is the way the report emphasizes the personal nature of the management of the foundation, which distributes nearly a billion dollars a year in research grants almost exclusively to SUNY's many colleges and universities; the way it...

As if Florida hasn't had enough scandals lately, there is now a mess in Sarasota County, on Florida's Gulf Coast. The focus is on terrible procurement policies and procedures that apparently allowed a lot of unethical behavior to occur. But as is usually the case, the center of the problem appears to have been the adminstration's attitude. And that attitude seems to have come out in the negotiations over the county administrator's severance package.

Update: November 1, 2011 (see below)

Hundreds of Bronx police officers are being investigated for ticket fixing, one of the most common forms of preferential treatment in local governments across the country. What's especially notable about this investigation is that, according to an article in the New York Times...

Two months ago, a book was published called The Jersey Sting, by two Star-Ledger reporters, Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin. It provides the history of an enormous federal sting operation which led to the arrest of dozens of government officials, most of them from local governments, on July 23, 2009 (see...

I wish that a grad student somewhere would decide to do an exhaustive study of a poor ethics environment. Broward County, Florida would not be a bad choice as the subject of her research.

According to an article in the Miami Herald this week, a Deerfield Beach commissioner, formerly mayor and formerly a Broward County commissioner, is the 17th...

Government ethics involves itself primarily with the formal norms set forth in ethics codes. But as the authors of the new book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press), point out, "It is through informal mechanisms that employees learn the 'true values' of the organization."