With the "big news" this week being the sexting of Rep. Anthony Weiner, it
seems appropriate to write about a piece I came across on the
i-sight.com website entitled "<a href="http://i-sight.com/investigation/do-workplace-fraud-investigations-lead…; target="”_blank”">Do
All
Workplace
Fraud Investigations Lead to Porn?</a>" The piece

It's nice when something you write about in a blog shows up on the
front page of the New York <i>Times</i> the following day. Yesterday, in a
post called "<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/privatization-and-transparency&quot; target="”_blank”">Privatization
and Transparency</a>," I discussed new types of privatization involving
nonprofits, which raise new sorts of problems. One type of nonprofit

I've written a little about ethics issues involving quasi-governmental
entities and private entities doing government work (<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/jurisdiction-and-oversight-over-nonpr…; target="”_blank”">oversight</a>,

<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/57039333/Hogan-Report-on-RF&quot; target="”_blank”">A
report on the relationship between New York's state university system
(SUNY) and the SUNY Research Foundation (RF)</a> was published
yesterday. What makes it of interest to this blog is the way the report
emphasizes the personal nature of the management of the foundation,
which distributes nearly a billion dollars a year in research grants

It's hard to know where to start with a situation in Crescent City, CA,
a town of 7,500 in northern California that has already been the
subject of <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/549&quot; target="”_blank”">a City Ethics
blog post</a>.<br>
<br>
One of the most striking things about the situation is that it is the
first time I have seen an anti-SLAPP-suit defense used successfully against someone who

<b>Electing EC Members</b><br>
Is electing an ethics commission a good idea? I had never heard of an
elected EC until this week, when <a href="http://www.pbpindiantribe.com/news.aspx?id=594&quot; target="”_blank”">I read that the
Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, an Indian nation in Kansas, canceled an
EC election</a> for four out of six seats, because there were no
candidates.<br>
<br>

At the very end of last year, a grand jury filed a report that found a great deal of
corruption in Florida's state and local governments, and made numerous
recommendations for ethics reform (see <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/grand-jury-report-florida-recommends-…; target="”_blank”">my blog post on the report</a>). This provided the perfect

As discussed in <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/dallas-ethics-reform-proposals-go-vot…
earlier
blog post</a>, eighteen months ago the Dallas council, under the
prodding of the mayor at the time, passed

Good news:  Westminster is not alone. No, I am not referring to
the British Parliament or the New York dog show. I am referring to the
Westminster, CO law that says that a campaign contributor has a relationship with the recipient of a sizeable campaign contribution
that gives rise to a conflict of interest and requires the recipient's withdrawal from participation

As if Florida hasn't had enough scandals lately, there is now a mess in
Sarasota County, on Florida's Gulf Coast. The focus is on terrible
procurement policies and procedures that apparently allowed a lot of
unethical behavior to occur. But as is usually the case, the center of
the problem appears to have been the adminstration's attitude. And that attitude seems to have come out in the negotiations over the county administrator's severance package.<br>
<br>