In the news

According to an article in the Washington Post this week, a politics professor, David E. Lewis, looked at the Bush administration, comparing agencies run by political appointees and those run by career bureaucrats. Although the appointees tended to be better educated and very successful in the private sector, the agencies run by career bureaucrats showed "better strategic...

A Nevada court found yesterday that the state ethics commission did not have jurisdiction over a state senator on grounds of legislative immunity, even though the state constitution has no Speech or Debate Clause. The judge gave the senator a preliminary injuction to prevent his having to appear before the ethics commission next week. No decision is available yet, but the judge did say that the state constitution would have to be amended for the ethics commission to have jurisdiction over a...

Most ethics codes effectively define a conflict of interest as a conflict between an official's personal financial interest and an official's obligation to the public interest. But this leaves out an enormous number of personal interests, many of which are themselves financial, including the financial interests of family members, business associates, and favorite charities.

Gift provisions often make it a violation for immediate family members to accept gifts from those doing...

The NYC Campaign Finance Board has put together an excellent Doing Business Database, consisting of a searchable list of individuals (principal owners, principal officers, and senior managers of entities) “doing business” with a wide assortment of city agencies and quasi-governmental entities, including through contracts, bids or proposals for contracts, concessions, franchises, grants, economic development agreements,...

Last month, I wrote about the conflict of interest that led credit agencies to ignore the risk inherent in mortgage-backed securities. A front-page article in today's New York Times shows how a different sort of conflict of interest at Citigroup allowed the risks involved in these securities to be ignored. No crimes, no politics, just plain...

A controversy currently going on in Fairfield, CT reminded me that one of the more easily misunderstood provisions of an ethics code is the special consideration, preferential treatment, or favoritism provision. The version in the City Ethics Model Code reads as follows: