According to <a href="http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/06/12/47352.htm&quot; target="”_blank”">Courthouse

One of the things that always fascinates me is that, while politicians have no problem asking experts legal, financial,
engineering, or human resource questions, they feel they know what
they need to know about government ethics questions.<br>
<br>
Take D.C. council member Vincent Orange. According to <a href="http://wamu.org/news/12/06/11/orange_proposes_dc_income_tax_exemption_f…; target="”_blank”">an

Despite writing this blog for six years, I keep finding
important areas of government ethics that I have not discussed. One
such area involves dealing with the possible conflicts of outside auditors. Large cities and counties
have internal auditors or comptrollers, but most local governments
employ the services of external auditing firms, just as companies do.
These auditors have special duties toward their clients, that is, to
the community, not to the individuals who hire them and with whom

In recent years, Florida's elected officials have shown a great deal
of leadership in the field of unethical and criminal misconduct. The
state has a weak state ethics commission, which has jurisdiction
over local officials, and until recently only one good local
government ethics program, in Miami/Dade County (Jacksonville and
Palm Beach County joined this list with ethics reform last year).
The major voices in government ethics in Florida have, sadly, been
grand juries.<br>
<br>

<h4>"Trying to protect public officials from warrantless ethics
complaints is a fruitless task; there will always be some who make
outrageous claims about the behavior of those at city hall.<br>
<br>
"Hiding such complaints from the public view, however, will not
make them go away. It’s better for the public to learn who is
crying wolf — along with those who have discovered a fox in the
henhouse — than to shield such things under the cloak of secrecy
and the notion of protecting reputations."</h4>

I recently read Judith N. Shklar's book <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=vfqbGgwEIQkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=fa…; target="”_blank”"><i>The Faces of Injustice</i></a> (Yale U.P., 1990). This excellent essay
about the difference between misfortune and injustice would not

<b>Update:</b> June 20, 2012 (see below)<br>
<br>
The saying goes that there are two sides to every story. But more
commonly there is a story and ways to spin the story. The problem
is telling them apart.<br>
<br>
This week, <a href="http://newsok.com/oklahoma-ethics-commission-needs-clear-consistent-rul…; target="”_blank”">a

Independent agencies are more likely than regular government
agencies to get into trouble, because they are usually more closed
and less supervised. And yet officials too often listen to agencies'
calls for independence from ethics programs, as if the
"independence" meant something positive that should be respected,
rather than that the agencies are unsupervised and unaccountable. An independent agency's
independence is only something positive when it is a watchdog

What does it mean to be a "high-caliber" nominee for a position on a
local ethics commission? Does it mean someone who has been in law
enforcement, a prosecutor or judge whose presence sends the message
that the law will be enforced? Or does it mean someone who appears
to be independent of the local government officials who are under
the commission's jurisdiction?<br>
<br>

What is the worst thing a government official can do when a conflict
situation becomes public? Is it worse to misrepresent the law, to
make accusations against those making the conflict situation public,
or to ignore the situation and hope nobody notices?<br>
<br>
New York governor Andrew Cuomo has done all of the above with
respect to the exposure of a secret gift of $2 million by an association of gambling
companies to a 501(c)(4) organization closely associated with the