Favoring Friends - The Massachusetts Approach
Everyone knows it’s not right for government officials to favor their friends, but because friendships are so difficult to define, they don’t appear in ethics codes. Relatives can be defined, domestic partners can be defined, business associates can be defined, but not boyfriends or pals or old buddies. This is one of the limitations of dealing with ethics in the form of a law.
But the Massachusetts Ethics Commission, which deals with local government as well as state government officials, has found a way to deal with favoritism given to friends. According to <a href="http://www.mass.gov/ethics/press_release.htm" target="”_blank”">its April 30 press release</a>, a former county retirement board member was found to have violated the state conflict of interest law by awarding a building renovation contract to a friend and failing to disclose the friendship, and also by voting to hire his friend to manage the facility and again failing to disclose the friendship.
<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/431">Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.</a>
The Ethics Commission employed two provisions to reach this decision: Section 23 (b) (2) of G.L. c 268A, which “prohibits a state employee from knowingly or with reason to know, using or attempting to use his official position to secure for himself or others unwarranted privileges or exemptions which are of substantial value and which are not properly available to similarly situated individuals,” and Section 23(b)(3), which “prohibits a state employee from, knowingly or with reason to know, acting in a manner which would cause a reasonable person, knowing all of the facts, to conclude that anyone can improperly influence or unduly enjoy that person’s favor in the performance of his official duties. This subsection further provides that the appearance of impropriety can be avoided if an elected public employee publicly discloses all of the relevant circumstances which would otherwise create the appearance of conflict of interest.”
What the board member did to favor his friend was to create the false impression of a competitive bid process, so that the other members would not know any favoritism was going on. And even though the board unanimously hired the friend, it did so not realizing that he was a friend of the board member.
Friendship itself, the Ethics Commission said, requires disclosure, and this lack of disclosure was enough to find a violation in the hiring matter. Had there actually been competitive bidding, the board member would not have been able to favor his friend. However, he and his friend fooled the board into believing that there was another competitive bid; it was this ruse that constituted favoritism in the contract matter.
The EC’s executive director, Karen L. Nober, is quoted in the press release as saying, “Public employees violate the public trust when they use their positions to benefit themselves or their friends. Public employees who have private friendships that overlap their public duties need to perform their duties fairly and objectively and disclose those personal relationships to avoid creating an actual or apparent conflict of interest.”
This seems to me a reasonable interpretation of a typical favoritism provision. Other ethics boards should consider doing this, after first letting officials know that friends should not be shown favoritism, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in the ethics code.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics