Complaints/ Investigations/Hearings

An interesting debate about lobbying and advisory groups can be found on the Austin Bulldog website. Late last week, the Bulldog published an article about an ethics complaint filed by the president of the Austin Neighborhoods Council (ANC) against an...

When city and county contractors and their lobbyists don't follow the rules, it's difficult to catch them, because few cities have an oversight office that investigates on its own initiative. Without such a program, communities depend on federal and state criminal enforcers who focus on bribery and kickbacks.

It is the FBI and a federal grand jury that did the job in Dallas County which, unlike the city of Dallas, has no ethics program, just an aspirational code. In fact, it has...

The District of Columbia's former chief administrative law judge settled with the D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability (BEGA) this week (the settlement agreement is attached; see below). The misconduct she admitted to included her hiring of a business partner without going through the standard hiring procedures, and contracting with a company owned by the business partner's boyfriend (see...

The big news in the government ethics world today is the investigative piece in the New York Times about New York governor Andrew Cuomo's interference in the work of the Moreland Commission he created to investigate corruption in the state government and to recommend reforms to prevent such corruption (see...

According to an Associated Press article this weekend, Jim Moran, a congressman from Virginia, was banned from entering Russia supposedly for a series of financial misdeeds. These supposed misdeeds, as delineated in Moran's Wikipedia page, include ethics and ethics-related criminal...

An excellent editorial yesterday by Dan Barton, editor of the Kingston (NY) Times, raises a few important issues relating to local government ethics proceedings.

According to Barton, Kingston's new ethics board dismissed a complaint from a city alderman that the mayor had violated the ethics code by hiring as an attorney for the city's local development corporation a lawyer with...