Misuse of Office/Special

On Friday, the Louisville ethics commission found that a council member intentionally violated several ethics provisions. This was its first major action under the city's new ethics code, which I wrote about last year. The EC gave the council member the most serious...

It's important for ethics commissions to be prepared for the occasional official who, along with his or her attorney, will do anything to stop or at least delay its investigation, including attacks on the EC itself. A good example of how relentless an official can be is John J. O'Connor, now former head of the SUNY Research Foundation, whom I wrote about in a recent blog post.

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 "Do All Workplace Fraud Investigations Lead to Porn?" The piece discusses the ideas of Ryan Hubbs, a forensic accountant.

Hubbs’...

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 City Ethics blog post.

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 appears to have been found guilty of an ethics violation in order to stop her criticism...

Update: November 1, 2011 (see below)

Hundreds of Bronx police officers are being investigated for ticket fixing, one of the most common forms of preferential treatment in local governments across the country. What's especially notable about this investigation is that, according to an article in the New York Times...

As a postscript to the Jersey Sting, on Wednesday, according to a Justice Department press release, the former CFO and CEO of a company that reconditioned and sold athletic equipment to schools and universities were...