Is Required Massachusetts Ethics Testing Overreaching or Under-reaching?

I've been hearing and reading quite a bit recently about the new Massachusetts law requiring requiring municipal employees to take an ethics test. According to the state ethics commission website, "this law sets a minimum standard of ethical conduct for all state employees and officials.”

Local officials have been up in arms and articles like this seem to be popping up regularly in the local press around the state. The primary complaint? That the state is wildly overreaching in requiring local municipal employees to take the ethics test. Not only is it seen as inconvenient, but as unwieldy and inappropriately costly. There are also many complaints that it is entirely irrelevant to many of the types of employees required to take the test. 

Is it inconvenient, unwieldy, and inappropriately costly? It certainly seems that it may be. Is it overreaching? That, I find to be a mind-numbingly strange idea. Here's the deal; the required "ethics test" is simply a basic review of the state's conflict of interest policies and no more. Come on now! Conflict of interest is a hugely important issue - and, yes, every municipal employee does need to know those rules and concepts inside out and sideways. But is that all they really need to know? Certainly not... It is hardly reasonable to train municipal officials and employees in a single area of ethics, no matter how important that one area is, and then somehow assume that all will magically be well. 

I get the impression from the state ethics commission site that there are plans afoot to broaden this training and I certainly hope that I'm interpreting that correctly. After all, if the goal is really to assure that all municipal officials and employees get training and a regular review in at least a "minimum standard of ethical conduct", they are going to need to learn about a whole lot more than conflict of interest.

 

Will an expanded ethics training program be more costly still? Yes, no doubt - perhaps even significantly more. However, the state can certainly set its sights on developing more cost-effective methods of providing (or requiring) more comprehensive training. That, however, is only a part of the issue.

 

To justify the additional expense, expanded training will need to be far more than a feel-good exercise; it will need to help officials and employees prevent the kinds of ethical missteps that can be deadly costly to their municipalities. To cover that ground, it will need to provide them with a variety of truly practical ideas and tools that they can use to make more ethically-attuned decisions in the course of their entire range of job duties and relationships. They will need to not only be able to do the right thing but also to more easily spot and appropriately respond to the wrong things they see (fraud and financial abuse, coercive business relationships, harassment concerns, etc.). That, obviously, involves a whole lot more than conflict of interest. So, is the new law overreaching? Hardly. It may need some serious work but, from my perspective, it is actually under-reaching in the extreme.