Transparency & Disclosure

The two best defenses against dealing responsibly with a conflict are that the local government attorney told me it was okay, and I didn't know there was a conflict. The first can be dealt with by getting the local government attorney out of the government ethics picture. But the second requires so…

Update below: The controversy in Baltimore over the mayor's acceptance of gifts from a developer whose companies have received a great deal of funding from the city appears now to be focused on whether or not the mayor was required to disclose these gifts, since the developer did not personally do …

The word is out:  if local government officials don't want to file financial disclosure statements, all they have to do is resign en masse and whoever wrote the ethics code will not only rewrite it, but will say all sorts of warm, wonderful things about them. This is the conclusion that comes from …

According to an article yesterday in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, there's a battle going on in New Orleans, but this time it involves a flood of public documents, as well as a trickle of financial disclosure forms. The battle is between the mayor and the city council, on one side, and a civil ri…

Hiding a conflict of interest can lead to much worse problems than appearing before an ethics commission and getting your hand slapped, or even getting slapped with a fine. A criminal case in Winston-Salem, NC this week shows how bad things can get. According to an article in today's Winston-Salem …

Perks that public officials give themselves should be monitored as carefully as gifts, campaign contributions, and relationships with contractors. But they are not. And they’re usually easy to hide. Rarely have perks been hidden as well as those of New York’s Republican state senators, who until th…

It's hard not to get excited about our new president when he says and does the right things when it comes to government ethics. In a memo to heads of executive departments and agencies, President Obama wrote: The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the fac…

To what extent should financial disclosure rules be applied to nonprofits that do government work? According to an article in Sunday's New York Times, two years ago New York State extended disclosure requirements to the board members of nonprofits "affiliated with, sponsored by or created by a coun…

In a recent blog entry, I looked at how a couple of Connecticut towns are using the Internet to get citizen feedback and provide transparency. But some cities have gone much further, according to a syndicated column by Neal Peirce. Cities and their citizens are starting to make use of what is known…

One of the interesting things about the attorney-client privilege in a government setting is that the privilege -- which is, of course, the client's, not the lawyer's -- is held by the office, not by the individual holding the office at the time of the communication. This is a major reason why the …