Conflicts of Interest

In the Indiana Secretary of State race, the headlines are all about voter fraud. But the bigger problem, I think, involves the failure of one of the candidates to differentiate himself from his seat on the Fishers city council. According to an article in the Indianapolis Star, although the candidat…

Two days ago, I wrote about a Louisiana lawyer-legislator who is arguing that disclosure rules should not apply to lawyers, because the practice of law is regulated by the state supreme court. The story behind an indictment in New Jersey this week makes a strong argument for applying disclosure rul…

Update: October 15, 2010 (see below) Decision-makers are given too much credit. Most individuals who vote on government matters are non-professionals who are paid little or nothing, and who rarely focus on the matters before their body. They are, therefore, very dependent on staff members who are p…

Four years after I wrote a blog post entitled The Ethics of Today's Municipal Pension Plan Problems, according to an op-ed piece in the New York Times, New Jersey agreed with the S.E.C. never again to fraudulently hide its underfunding of the state’s public pension system. And the Republican candid…

Using government employees for private purposes is one of the most common ethics code violations. This violation is especially bad because it involves coercion of individuals, in this case subordinates who are not in a position to say no. Coercion and intimidation rarely occur outside of a poor eth…

The lead article in yesterday's New York Times was on charities set up by members of congress. I've written a few times about the use of charities to get around campaign finance and gift provisions (1 2 3), but this is an area of special creativity, where new ideas, and new reasons for regulation, …

Update: September 6, 2010 (see below) For many local government employees, gratuities are the principal way in which an ethics code affects them, because many ethics code prohibit gratuities. But are they really a government ethics issue? In other words, does a government employee, say a sanitation…

Should advisory board and task force members be excepted from conflict of interest rules? Jurisdictions disagree about this. Some believe that, when a board has no authority to act or implement, the usual rules should not apply. The principal argument is that there are times when a government needs…

According to an article in yesterday's New York Times, the New York Governor’s Task Force on Public Authorities Reform has filed its report (not yet available online) on the implementation of the Public Authorities Reform Act of 2009, whose provisions are summarized in a separate document. The task…

The usual image we get when we hear about a government official getting something free from a contractor is of a new kitchen or driveway. But free services can also be invisible, like legal advice and other professional service. That's the issue in Tulsa this week, according to an article in the Tu…