Robert Wechsler's blog

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...

When a lobbying code requires that lobbyists report "specific lobbying issues" or "the subjects on which they have lobbied," what exactly is required? The best approach is to include more specific language in the disclosure section, such as "information sufficient for an ordinary member of the public to identify the law or resolution, contract, grant, regulation, real property or project, rule, proceeding, board or commission determination, or other matter."

Another approach is to...

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 article in the San Francisco Chronicle last week, Oakland's council approved an amendment to the city charter, to go before voters in November, that would increase the authority of the city's ethics commission and...