Massachusetts Ethics Training Update: Some Well-Intentioned But Unfortunate Changes

If you follow this blog, you have already seen my prior comments regarding the uproar over the recently-instituted Massachusetts required ethics training. Yesterday, the Massachusetts Municipal League announced a summary of changes now made to that ethics testing requirement and the Massachusetts state ethics commission's own overview of the changes can be found here. (Of course, to clarify, what has been called the state "ethics testing requirement" really only pertains to a set of mandated reviews of their conflict of interest policies. As I have previously suggested, this mandated review falls squarely under the heading of 'necessary but not sufficient'...)

Given the persistent statewide uproar over the required policy reviews and testing, the commission has softened their stance on who must review the policy and be tested. As the policy in its original form seemed to be somewhat unwieldy and expensive for local municipalities, there's certainly no faulting the commission for making an effort to attend to local governments' concerns. In fact, such efforts should be commended. Unfortunately, the ways in which they have chosen to amend the policy seem to have taken an already-dubiously weak policy and now weakened it yet further.

Perhaps obviously, my biggest concern remains that this training continues to only attend to conflict of interest issues which, as important as they are, are but one drop in a very large bucket of ethics issues about which government officials and employees need to be trained. What's my beef with the training aside from the fact that it is overly-narrow in scope? A Power-Point review every two years and signing off on receipt of the policy is simply inadequate to assure that officials and employees really 'get' what is expected. They might or might not understand the rules after the mandated review but will this equip them to recognize and appropriately respond to less obvious ethical challenges on the job? I hardly think so.

The new weaknesses? According to the MMA story: "The new procedures also provide exemptions for employees who cannot comply with requirements because of limited English fluency or reading comprehension, special needs, and leaves of absence. Also exempted are vendors and contractors who provide one day or less of services per year."

1.) Limited English fluency, reading problems, special needs, and leaves of absence are hardly reasons for an employee to be excused from this already-minimal level of policy review! They are faced with exactly the same conflict of interest issues (as well as other ethical challenges) as every other official and employee. They certainly require some kind of accommodation to get the training done. However, it seems ludicrous to imagine that their circumstances somehow magically make them immune to the kinds of problems this training is presumably intended to reduce.

2.) I am unaware that vendors and contractors lose their ability to create a conflict of interest if given less than a full business day to do so. Perhaps having a dollars-of-business threshold might make more sense. Or, simply assure that every vendor and contractor sign off on their awareness and understanding of the policies. (That would still be extremely uncomfortably minimal but would, I hope, be better than nothing.)

I am also concerned that: "all municipal employees who are exempted from the online training requirements are also exempted from the requirement that they be provided with summaries of the conflict-of-interest law." If they are employees of any stripe, they need to know about the conflict of interest policies and their rationale. Consequently, if they are exempted from the online training, I would think that they would be exactly the ones to whom one would want to give a copy of the policies. Training it ain't but it would at least assure that they have some level of awareness of these essential rules.

Are there some positives? Absolutely. A provision for group training, for starters, is great. In fact, I hadn't even realized that this wasn't previously an option. Elaborating on who will be considered a "key employee" is also a welcome idea though I'll reserve some of my judgment on that until I see how, in fact, they will be defined.

The state should certainly be applauded for making an effort to create a more user-friendly and less costly ethics training mandate. My applause pretty much stops there, though. No matter how positive their intentions, it appears that the commission has taken an already all-too-weak training initiative and simply watered it down a whole lot further.