Enforcement/Penalties

According to an editorial in the Orange County (CA) Register this week, Orange County citizens will soon vote on an initiative that would make their county the second one to turn its campaign finance program over to the state's Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC). But the initiative's wording calls the FPPC "the ethics commission," which causes confusion, because many in the county...

In a an op-ed in the Daily Kos last Friday, Janos Marton — special counsel to New York state's recent Moreland Commission on state-level corruption — makes an excellent point about one of the problems involved in the criminal enforcement of government ethics :

There are several problems with the settlement the Massachusetts AG reached last week with a lobbying firm that the AG alleged had entered into an illegal contingency fee agreement with a hospital. According to the AG's press release, the lobbying firm would be paid a percentage of funds paid to the hospital pursuant to legislation the lobbyist would try to help get passed...

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle last week, Oakland's council approved an amendment to the city charter, to go before voters in November, that would increase the authority of the city's ethics commission and...

According to an Associated Press article this weekend, Jim Moran, a congressman from Virginia, was banned from entering Russia supposedly for a series of financial misdeeds. These supposed misdeeds, as delineated in Moran's Wikipedia page, include ethics and ethics-related criminal...

A recent action by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against the city of Harvey, IL, a poor city of 30,000 just south of Chicago, deals with a different sort of fiduciary duty than the usual government ethics case. In a complaint dated June 24, 2014 (attached; see below), the SEC alleges that the city's comptroller acted as financial adviser in three bond issues for a hotel development, diverted some of the funds to himself, and also diverted funds to the city's general fund. The...