Misuse of Office/Special

Using government employees for private purposes is one of the most common ethics code violations.

This violation is especially bad because it involves coercion of individuals, in this case subordinates who are not in a position to say no. Coercion and intimidation rarely occur outside of a poor ethical environment.

This violation also shows a serious failure to recognize the boundary between public and private, which is the heart of government ethics.

And...

The lead article in yesterday's New York Times was on charities set up by members of congress. I've written a few times about the use of charities to get around campaign finance and gift provisions (...

What can a citizen do when a local government official falsely impugns her reputation and retaliates against her due to her opposition to a matter the official supports? The City Ethics Model Code has a provision that deals with an official falsely impugning a citizen's reputation, but very few ethics codes contain such a provision. And even our model code has nothing that deals with...

According to an article in yesterday's New York Times, the New York Governor’s Task Force on Public Authorities Reform has filed its report (not yet available online) on the implementation of the Public Authorities Reform Act of 2009, whose provisions are...

Whistleblower provisions are extremely important to government ethics, but poorly worded ethics provisions can undermine even the best whistleblower provisions, especially in unscrupulous hands. One such ethics provision is the confidential information provision.

A nurse at a Winker County, TX hospital was charged with felony misuse of confidential information for reporting improper medical treatment by a doctor, according to...

There is no greater pleasure for some people than accusing ethics professionals and ethics commission members of unethical behavior. That is why ethics professionals and ethics commission members have to be extra careful about what they do, and why individuals who have not dealt responsibly with conflicts of interest, at least in the recent past, should not accept a nomination to an ethics commission.

What no one wants to read is what is being written about the current chair of the...