Chicago Compliance and Integrity Survey

Update: January 4, 2010 (see below)

On December 15, Chicago published a Compliance and Integrity Survey that its Office of Compliance commissioned from the Ethics Resource Center, a primarily corporate ethics and compliance research organization.

Here are some of the principal findings of the survey. Comparisons are to the local government portion (pages 31-35) of the ERC's 2007 National Workplace Ethics Survey

Ethics Environment:  62% said they perceive the city’s culture of compliance to be strong (compared to 80% in the national average of local governments). But only 17% (versus the national average of 54%) feel that Chicago employees are rewarded for following compliance standards. On the other hand, many fewer Chicago employees said they witnessed conflicts of interest than the national average (15% vs. 26%).

Supervisors:  Only 69% credited workplace supervisors with reinforcing ethical conduct on the job, compared with the national average of 80%. (see Whistle-blowing below for more on supervisors)

Ethical Leadership:  67% see top management as communicating the importance of following the rules, but only 42% perceive the information as satisfactory. In the local government average, 82% said top management communicates the importance of rules and 77% were satisfied with the information.

Whistle-blowing:  Observations of workplace misconduct were lower in Chicago than the local government average. However, only 50% of Chicago employees reported their observations, compared to a national average of 67%. The primary reason for not reporting was the belief that no corrective action would be taken. But employees also reported more retaliation than the national average (26% vs. 20%), and many more feared retaliation than the national average (60% vs. 28% feared retaliation from supervisors, and 41% vs. 26% from coworkers).

The ERC's executive summary recommends that the 2007 compliance program has been recognized by city employees, and that the next step is to focus on culture. But the Next Steps section treats Chicago as if it were a big corporation rather than a highly dysfunctional local government. And since the survey was commissioned by the office of compliance, nothing is said about the city's ethics program. This is yet another example of the sort of dysfunction that comes from dividing government ethics up into components in a way that leads them to compete rather than work together toward the same goals.

Update: January 4, 2010
San Diego commissioned a similar compliance survey from the Ethics Resource Center in 2006, and the recommendations similarly ignore the principal differences between corporations and governments.

According to the People's Reporter column on voiceofsandiego.com, a second ethics survey was commissioned in 2008, but apparently was not published because the mayor got rid of his Office of Ethics and Integrity, which was the commissioning agency. By the way, only one of the Office's five goals (see pp. 6-7) had anything to do with government ethics; the rest of the goals involved personnel issues.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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