New National Government Ethics Survey Shows That Too Few Local Governments Have Strong Ethical Cultures

The Ethics Resource Center’s first National Government Ethics Survey has just come out, and is available free at the ERC’s website, although it requires registration. It is the result of a random 2007 telephone poll of government employees, and is part of a series of polls looking at ethics in different sorts of workplaces. City Ethics' Founder, Carla Miller, was on the Advisory Group for this survey.

Here are some of the Survey’s findings relating to local governments. Not surprisingly, the least amount of progress in establishing ethics and compliance programs in government has occurred at the local level, and the most amount of misconduct was reported at the local level.

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26% reported each of two principal kinds of misconduct having occurred in the last twelve months: abusive behavior and people putting their own interests ahead of the organization’s. Both of these are abuses of power and position, the core of government ethics violations.

Two-thirds of those polled said they reported misconduct to managers, but only 3% reported via whistleblower hotlines. 20% of those who reported misconduct said that they experienced retaliation (and much of the misconduct was minor or not ethics-oriented, such as time spent on the Internet, discrimination, and safety issues, which would not likely lead to retaliation). 28% of those who did not report misconduct said they feared retaliation from management and 26% of those who did not report misconduct said they feared retaliation from peers. Many also said that they felt pressure not to follow organization standards.

This means that many local governments are places where the fear of abusive behavior rules, and where there is pressure on employees to follow unethical cultural norms. Fear is an area where perception is most important. As far as I’m concerned, causing fear in an organization is worse than stealing money from it. Money can be returned, and it’s only money. The effects of fear on employees and on the community as a whole can never be fixed, and yet no one is ever fined or imprisoned for it. It is also rarely reported in newspapers or considered when people vote. It is often seen as a he said-she said issue, but it is not. Ridding the workplace of fear is a principal reason why it is so important to create an ethical environment in local governments.

While the great majority of those polled said that their local government had a code of conduct, discipline for violators, ethics training, and a hotline, only 14% said that the programs were well-implemented (compared to 30% at the federal level).

Only 9% of those polled said their local government had a strong ethical culture, 40% a strong-leaning ethical culture, 43% weak-leaning ethical culture, and 8% a weak ethical culture. That leaves a great deal of room for improvement.

These are soft results based on fairly small numbers of people polled. But in government ethics, perception is very important, and employees know better than anyone else what is going on in their midst.