Conflicts of Interest

According to an article in today's New York Daily News, an investigation by the U. S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York has found that the son of the NY State Senate majority leader was a consultant for a company that won a county stormwater treatment contract in the majority leader's …

Mixing Election Oversight and Professional Contracts According to an Illinois Business Times article on April 5, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners is chaired by an attorney whose law firm has received presumably no-bid contracts to lobby for city agencies, that is, contracts from the admi…

the subsection of my book Local Government Ethics Programs on proximity (in the Indefinite Benefits section), I oppose numbers such as 500 feet. My argument is that "what is important here is not the actual concrete benefit or harm, but rather how the official’s presumed expectation of benefit or h…

The arrest of New York state senate majority leader Sheldon Silver points to an ongoing institutional problem that is not limited to New York state:  the law firm as the perfect place to launder money. The reason for this is that lawyer-client confidentiality, at least as it is often practiced, all…

According to an article yesterday on the Baltimore Brew website, a year ago Baltimore's mayor officiated at a wedding between two individuals who lobby the city government. In Las Vegas, no less. Mayors, judges and, sometimes, other local government officials often officiate at weddings. Some ethic…

According to an article in the November 29 issue of The Economist, when China banned gifts to government officials, sales of the principal producer of baijiu, a sort of Chinese vodka, fell 78% in just a year. The only sales that would likely go down if gifts were banned across the board in the Unit…

Former lobbyist, now jailbird, Kevin A. Ring shared some valuable words of wisdom in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post this week. He says that the gift limit should be zero, because any other limit will be abused (what he doesn't say is that any exception will also be abused). He also notes tha…

Ferguson, MO — where Michael Brown was recently killed by a police officer, and the police department's first reaction was to protect the officer and keep the facts secret — is an unusual case of a local government where a scandal is likely to actually increase rather than decrease citizen particip…

I believe that the best solution to the problem of having lobbyists and others seeking special benefits from the government sitting on government advisory boards is to get rid of these advisory boards. Conflicts involving these boards are important because, although they are "merely advisory," thei…

The Stamford (CT) Advocate's Angela Carella wrote an excellent column on Saturday about a post-employment (also known as revolving door) situation in Stamford. Entitled "In Ethical Questions, Appearances Matter," the column looks at the many problems with a school board member taking a job with a c…