It's here at last:  the first government ethics app (at least that I know of). According to a Capitol Alert post on the Sacramento Bee website yesterday,  California's Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) has a free smartphone app called Gift Tracker (first for Android, and soon for Apple) to let officials (state only, it appears) record in real time gifts received from restricted sources.

FPPC Enforcement Division Chief Gary Winuk is quoted as saying, "If you're at an event, if you're at a meeting, if you're giving a speech, if you're in a reception, you can just log in what the gift is." Then you export the log into a spreadsheet to attach to your annual disclosure statement (no, it doesn't appear to be a spreadsheet searchable by the public).

The app also allows officials to contact gift sources via text message, e-mail, or telephone, to let them know what they plan to report. Thus, an official can contact a reception host to let it know what she ate and drank at the reception. This way the official and the reception host are on the same page, even if no one will see the page for quite some time.

The app even helps you keep track of your aggregate gifts from a particular source, so you won't go over the $440 annual limit. The question is, can it tell you the fair market value of a sushi sampler, a glass of the best champagne, or the drafting of a bill?

According to a column in today's New York Times and a visit to the New York City Business Integrity Commission's (BIC) website, the BIC provides three easy lessons in how not to run an oversight commission. The BIC has jurisdiction over the private waste carting industry, businesses operating in the city's public wholesale markets, and the shipboard gambling industry. Its goal is to "preserve a healthy and competitive environment in [these] industries in NYC through a unique and comprehensive merger of law enforcement tactics and regulatory oversight."

In his column, Michael Powell asserts that, although the BIC is meant to create a competitive environment in the industries it oversees, at the BIC itself "no-bid, zero-transparency contracts seem distressingly common." According to the most recent former BIC administrator, there is “no requirement at the commission that [a contract] go out for competitive bid. There’s an internal review process.”

Yes, another New York state legislator has been arrested on bribery charges. That's scarcely news. According to an article in today's New York Times, he was helping developers get permits to open adult day care centers in his district. In other words, he was doing local constituency work as a state legislator, using his influence rather than his votes.

But that's not all. What makes this bribery case unusually egregious is his introduction of a bill to place a moratorium on the construction of competing day care centers. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York referred to the legislator's bill as “an especially breathtaking bit of corruption, even by Albany standards.”

Yesterday, Los Angeles' KCET-TV put up a database on it website to show who's giving to candidates in the current city and school board elections. You can see which city officials, business people, and others are giving, who's getting contributions from which zipcodes, and more. The database is a bit slow, at least today, just a few days before the first primary, but that's to be expected.

Transparency in government should not be limited only to officials. Disclosure rules should also apply to everyone seeking special benefits from government, such as contracts, permits, or grants. For one thing, without transparency on both sides of every transaction, it is impossible for the public or officials to know if there are any conflicts that particular officials need to deal with.

One popular way to get around transparency is the shell company. A company can easily be set up so that its ownership is secret. This is often done with development companies. The company has to have a front man, at least an attorney, who appears at zoning board meetings and the like. But it usually is not required to disclose the names of its owners. Without the disclosure of these names, how can anyone know whether officials, their family members, or their business associates own a company involved in a matter before them? And without disclosure, it is easy for an official to say she didn't know her brother was an owner, if this fact comes out later.

No one wants a political government ethics program, and yet the people who most often worry out loud that it will be political want it to be political. This apparent paradox can be explained by looking at the various meanings of the word "political." Which of these meanings is most important to a government ethics program, and which of them are, well, "just politics"? And what can a government ethics program do to lessen politics?