Dealing Openly and Responsibly with a Conflict of Interest

You hear it again and again: “I didn’t know. I wasn’t told.” It’s the ultimate defense. Rarely do you hear, “I didn’t know, but I should have. It’s my responsibility to know and make sure I’m told things like this. I will act as if I knew, because I should have known.”

There’s nothing wrong with a conflict of interest. When you learn about one, you discuss it openly and deal with it responsibly. When you learn that someone knew and didn’t deal with it, and then denied knowing, then it’s not the conflict that’s undermining confidence in government anymore, it’s the denial, the coverup.

According to an article in Gambit Weekly, new Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who ran on a platform of ethics and transparency, said he knew nothing about a recent appointee’s serious conflict of interest.

The new chair of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), about as important a position as you can get in Louisiana right now, is the son of a man whose engineering firm did $47 million of business last year alone with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the CPRA’s principal partner (the firm also did work for the state).

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The engineering firm’s owner said that the governor's staff knew this at the time of the appointment, and that he had said there was a conflict, but nobody listened. The firm agreed to step away from projects that would create an ongoing conflict.

So why not be open and tell everyone about the conflict and how you’re dealing with it! Denying that you knew only makes people thinks that the conflict must be a bad thing, that you didn’t deal with it responsibly, and that the son should not be appointed. Denying makes it look like the attempt to cure the conflict was not really enough. What is needed is open discussion of whether the cure was sufficient. But it might be too late now.