Independent agencies, especially those with lots of money to spend
and contracts to enter into, require not just ethics policies, but a
comprehensive, independent ethics program. This rarely acknowledged
fact has been made clear once again by an external audit of an
agency that proved completely unable to self-regulate its officials'

<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/us/politics/anita-dunn-both-insider-a…; target="”_blank”">A
front-page article in today's New York <i>Times</i></a> looks on a
conflict situation that is usually ignored:  the unpaid adviser
who effectively sells her inside, often confidential information to
her clients. She is not technically a lobbyist, because her

Intimidation is, I believe, the worst kind of ethical misconduct in
government, because (1) it limits or changes participation of
people in the democratic
process, (2) it is emotionally damaging, and (3) it enables all
sorts of ethical misconduct. Intimidation is a fundamental form of
misuse of power and position. (For more about

It is important to bring contractors into an ethics program,
requiring them to disclose gifts their employees make to officials, and to deal responsibly with
possible conflicts they are aware of. Businesses tend to deal with
such things internally. Bringing them into an ethics program requires them to
recognize that dealing with conflict situations internally is not
enough.<br>
<br>
The fact is that most ethics programs do not place sufficient
requirements on contractors. Often, ethics programs have no

I recently wrote <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/advice-ethics-advice-falls-deaf-ears&…; target="”_blank”">a blog post</a> about a situation where a citizen asked
an ethics commission for ethics advice when council members failed
to do so and, despite the corporation counsel's suggestion that it provide the advice,
the ethics commission refused to provide it.<br>
<br>

One conflict that is difficult to deal with in an ethics code, but
which comes up again and again, is the conflict situation that arises
when a local government official sits on a regional board or holds
another office that has a different constituency than the one he was
elected or appointed to represent.<br>
<br>
This issue arose a few days ago, when an attorney hired by the

Last week, a resident from one of the towns next to mine (Wallingford, CT) called me
for advice regarding his request for an advisory opinion. The
request involved the appropriateness of council members affiliated
with a church participating in a matter that involved funding for
renovation of a wall along the church's parking lot. This is a difficult conflict situation, but some town officials made it much more complicated than it had to be. Not only did
the ethics board, mayor, and council show a lack of understanding of

<br>I don't talk much in this blog or in my book <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/ethics%20book&quot; target="”_blank”"><i>Local Government
Ethics Programs</i></a> about character. However, there is another approach to
government ethics that is sometimes referred to as "the character
approach." For example, the <a href="http://josephsoninstitute.org/">Josephson

<b>Update:</b> October 10, 2012 (see below)<br>
<br>
So far, I have ignored this year's most famous local ethics
proceeding, against San Francisco sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. The reason
I ignored it is the reason I am writing about it now:  I think
the proceeding should have been dismissed because the sheriff's misconduct
involved neither a conflict of interest nor his official duties.<br>
<br>
The fact that the complaint was brought by the mayor against an

It's valuable to put government ethics in the larger context of the
use of public office for private purposes that does not involve a
financial benefit for anyone. In other words, much of politics is
personal. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/books/review/subversives-by-seth-rose…; target="”_blank”">A
review in this weekend's New York <i>Times Book Review</i></a> got me