Advisory Opinions

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?

In October, I wrote a blog post about a report commissioned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), based on an investigation of an ethics issue involving a Washington, D.C. council member and transit authority board member. The focus of my post was on the conflicted situation of a city council member on a regional...

News from British Columbia provides strong evidence of how difficult it is for anyone to deal with his own conflict situation, even a government ethics professional. No one should think that it is easy for someone to see an appearance of impropriety relating to himself or to respond to a conflict allegation against him in anything but a personal manner. A government ethics program must facilitate the process of dealing responsibly with a conflict situation by allowing, or even requiring,...

With the frequent confusion of person and office, sometimes it's not that easy to tell the difference between a gift to a local government agency and a gift to its director. This confusion can open an agency director to accusations of ethical misconduct.

This is what has happened in Baltimore. According to an article in the...

A presidential election day is a good time to consider how vague, character-based ethics rules can be misused.

According to an article in the October 27 Economist, the Iranian constitution, for example, requires a presidential candidate to have the attributes of "trustworthiness and piety." Iraq's requires that a presidential candidate have "a...

Independent agencies, especially those with lots of money to spend and contracts to enter into, require not just ethics policies, but a comprehensive, independent ethics program. This rarely acknowledged fact has been made clear once again by an external audit of an agency that proved completely unable to self-regulate its officials' and employees' conflicts of interest. The agency is the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), which...