Enforcement & Complaints

Standard of proof is a big issue in ethics enforcement, as it is in any enforcement. A year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post on the mishmash of standards of proof in local ethics codes and in the codes of states that have jurisdiction over local government ethics. In many codes there is no stated standard or a worthlessly ambiguous standard. In others, the standard is clear, but a serious obstacle to enforcement.

According to an article in this week's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a rule prohibiting Georgia state employees from accepting gifts over $25 is not being enforced. At all.

What's an ethics commission to do? Even ethics commissions with teeth, that is, with the ability to fine officials, rarely have a way of actually collecting the fines. And if they do have a way of collecting fines, it can make things look unfair.

There are limits on the legislative immunity of local government officials, according to a decision yesterday by the Baltimore Circuit Court in the Dixon case (attached; see below), involving the mayor of Baltimore at the time she was president of the city council.

When a congressman goes after a lawyer whose organization filed an ethics complaint against him (in his capacity as Colorado's secretary of state), you know he is more interested in getting even than he is in the public interest. Getting even, however, is not what public servants should be doing.

Accusing someone of a conflict of interest can lead to trouble, especially if the person you accuse is a litigious lawyer and you do it outside of an ethics proceeding. This is what one can read from a $5 million suit filed by a former town attorney against the town of Victor, NY  (pop. 10,000) and a member of the town's planning board.

Gov. Sarah Palin's national fame has brought government ethics complaints to the attention of people who had never paid any attention to them. And the result has, in general, been one of distortion rather than education. The latest news has especially distorted the nation's view of government ethics: the argument that defending against frivolous ethics complaints was too costly in dollars and time, and therefore damaging to the state and the people of Alaska, so damaging that the governor resigned her position.

"Investigators, like prosecutors, must understand that the desire to go after big game to garner big headlines may be as unethical as the offenses they are pursuing."

This is the central point of a formal statement made by the new chair of the New York State Commission on Public Integrity concerning the report of the Inspector General on the former executive director of the the commission and the commission itself.

In a  recent blog post, I wrote about the fining of the executive director of Philadelphia's board of ethics for violating confidentiality rules. That blog post focused on dealing responsibly with a possible violation of an ethics code provision (although not actually an ethics provision, but instead a disciplinary rule). Now I would like to focus on confidentiality rules and penalties in the government ethics context, and the many constitutional, policy, and logical problems these rules and penalties run into.

In March, I started out a blog entry by saying that "I thought I might write a piece about using ethics complaints for the purpose of political harassment" with respect to Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. But then I discovered that the particular ethics complaint was legitimate, and talked about the complaint itself and how it applied to local government situations.