Several readers of my monthly Municipal Ethics Tips and Trends newsletter suggested that part of this month's edition might have broader implications than just to local governments. Could well be. With that hope, here is a slightly adapted version:
Improve government ethics by paying less attention to them? Really? Well, kinda, yeah.
As I work more and more with government officials and employees, I have seen an unfortunate and
terribly destructive trend in how government ethics are defined. That
trend is to see them as strictly involving a very narrow
band of legal mandates including such things as conflict of interest,
recusal, undue influence, etc. Each of these is critically important, of
course, and every official and employee needs to know, with clarity,
what the rules are regarding them. However, this short list of mandates,
however important, is really wildly insufficient if the goal is to help
government officials and employees prevent the more common
ethical and legal risks actually seen on the job.
What else needs to be trained on?
It's really the same list as is needed in every other type of business
setting. A good 'starter list' includes training on hostile work
environment issues, non-discrimination issues, the basics of fraud
detection in the workplace, do's and don'ts of confronting others on
ethics concerns, do's and don'ts regarding consulting on ethics
concerns, and training on how officials and employees can think better
on their feet when it comes to both recognizing and responding to the broadest possible range of potential ethics
issues on the job. In my experience, only the first two of these areas are
routinely covered in 'government ethics training' - and then usually only in a cursory way - and yet problems in the entire range of these
areas collectively account for far more problems than do the areas more typically covered in government ethics training.
Whose job is it to assure that this broader
approach to ethics training is put into place? Other than at a federal level, I often hear that it is
HR's responsibility to do it. However I hear from a good many government HR folks that they don't actually have the authority to even
offer this type of training let alone require it. (They can and should
heartily lobby for this type of training, of course, but may not
ultimately be have the power to assure that it happens.) In my
experience, more thorough ethics training usually needs to be set up by
agency or department heads regardless of the level of government, by city managers when at the local level, etc. Whether they can offer it versus
requiring it is different from place to place and agency or department to agency or department. However, they certainly have
the authority to put the training process in place.
If you work in government and have the
authority to set up more thorough ethics training than what your officials and employees are getting now, use it! If you don't have that authority, be sure to work
with those who do to help them see the value in ethics training that
goes well beyond what we usually see as 'government ethics'. The return
on investment in that training - for government officials and employees at all levels of government - can be huge. (And, of course, that's before calculating the even broader return for the citizens for whom those officials and employees are working.)
What Milton, NY Understands About Ethics That Most Businesses Don't
My catching up on goings-on around the country for my Municipal Ethics News and Views blog started with this piece blaring the opinion that the San Diego ethics commission is an expensive redundancy that overreaches. Now if it's true that they are "hiring a new investigator to check whether campaigns are using 12-point type for their 'paid for by' lines, as required by city law, instead of the 6-point type required under state law", I share some of the writer's concern. However, the central argument is that most of the local ethics code is already covered by state law. Maybe so, but does the state have both the resources and the interest in monitoring local government ethics at the same level as local governments do? With rare exceptions, I hardly think so. Bravo to San Diego - as well as the other California cities with their own ethics commissions - for taking the proverbial bull by the horns and assuring that their city's ethics stay in line. Is there a question about how they are spending their resources? If so, that needs to be openly discussed and challenged - but not used as the foundation for a wholesale dismissal of the importance of the commission and its overall mission.
It's easy to attack local government ethics codes, or the code of any organization, for exactly the reasons they need to be in place - they require that those covered by the code do what is right as opposed to what is merely easy or convenient at the time. This piece from Macon.com quotes councilman James Timley as saying of their ethics code, “I didn’t vote for it... You want to do all this stuff that makes you feel good and look good, but I told you this would come back to get us.” Now I need to allow both that this quote might be out of context in the article and that I haven't seen the Macon code. However, the sentiment is a both common and unfortunate one. This happens to be regarding a local government ethics code but it's a complaint is heard throughout the private sector as well.
If one doesn't support an ethics code because it truly does overreach or because it is either toothless or otherwise unenforceable, you have my total support. However, in that case, work to create a more appropriate document and enforcement structure, not dismiss the idea of a code! That a code makes some things less convenient is a ludicrous reason to attack it, assuming that the inconvenience is simply due to assuring that officials and employees are doing the right thing. Should codes be as 'user-friendly' as possible? Absolutely! But, like it or not, sometimes doing the right thing in government, business, or anywhere else for that matter, is not what happens to be the most convenient.
Meanwhile, little Milton, New York seems to 'get it'. After, apparently, a history of ethics concerns, they decided that they needed to take some serious steps towards assuring improved ethics and did exactly that. In fact, as this piece from the Saratogian reports, they managed to do what most far larger governments and businesses haven't been able to achieve - they got everyone into the same room, decided in a bipartisan manner what needed to be addressed, and then did exactly that. Bravo! Of course, their code has yet to be formalized and approved but - if the reports of their start are any indication - they are truly well ahead of the pack compared both to many local governments and businessses.
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