Ethical Obligations Do Not End at the Line Drawn By Jurisdictional Language

There are two morals to the following story. One involves law, the other ethics.

Last August, the Nevada Policy Research Institute ran a long commentary on the fact that Nevada's 17 school superintendents were not filing financial disclosure statements with the state ethics commission, something required of all the state's "public officers." Even though the superintendents met all three of the definition's requirements, it turns out that the school boards that appointed them were only authorized, not required to appoint them. Therefore, they were not "public officers."

Hence, the legal moral of the story:  keep the definition of who is subject to an ethics code's jurisdiction as broad as possible. Keep out any language that is not absolutely necessary to make a distinction between, say, a department head and a secretary.

But more important is the ethical moral of the story.

The public information officer for the largest school district in the state, with a budget of $7 billion, responded to an NPRI request for financial disclosure statements, "[B]e advised that the law does not apply to superintendents of schools. As a result, there are no records responsive to your request."

Since the state EC cannot make a determination on an issue without either a complaint or the official requesting an advisory opinion (another legal problem), and the 17 superintendents had not requested an advisory opinion, no one could question this position without filing a complaint.

This changed when the largest school district hired a new superintendent, who did ask for an advisory opinion. In an NPRI news report last week, we learn that the state EC confirmed that superintendents are indeed not required to file disclosure statements. But the request enabled the EC to submit a bill to the legislature to amend the definition of "public officer" to include school superintendents. A good legal ending to the story, assuming the bill passes.

But there's still the ethical moral of the story:  Just because you're not required by a poorly written law to file a statement you know you should file, that doesn't absolve you of the ethical obligation to file it. It's good to go through the proper legal channels to get the law interpreted and changed, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't file statements in the meantime. Or even if the legislature refused to amend the definition.

The reason is that ethics is not law. Laws are minimum requirements. Individuals who are not required to follow an ethics code are not absolved from acting ethically; they are only absolved from enforcement. This goes for council members who except themselves from an ethics code, union members whose contract absolves them from ethics jurisdiction, and anyone else who is excluded for any reason, good or bad.

You would think that a school superintendent would understand the importance of educating about values and educating through example. What a good opportunity it would have been to teach their students and colleagues that doing the right thing is more important than following the letter of the law, especially when the letter of the law provides an unintended loophole. Improving both ethics and education requires leadership.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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