IEC Journal

OGE: Document Ethics Advice, Work With IGs

OGE responds to a GAO report entitled Post-Government Employment Restrictions and Foreign Agent Registration: Additional Action Needed to Enhance Implementation of Requirements 12-16 (July 2008), by providing the following guidance:

OGE strongly encourages agency ethics officials to document ethics advice provided to current and former employees.  Additionally, ethics officials should establish close working relationships with their respective Inspector General offices.  This includes providing Inspector General personnel with information when needed about the ethics advice given to specific individuals.  This also may include providing training and other assistance to help Inspector General personnel understand better the criminal conflict of interest laws, standards of conduct, and pertinent supplemental agency regulations.

Gov Exec Reviews Hatch Act, OSC

Government Executive magazine has an interesting overview (here & here) of the Hatch Act and the Office of Special Counsel, including many links to related articles.

G

Assessing Your Training Quality: See Yourself As Others See You

O wad some Power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us ...

These lines from "To A Louse On Seeing One On A Lady's Bonnett at Church," possibly the "Greatest Hit" of Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796), are relevant to ethics training. "Seeing ourselves as others see us" can be a welcome antidote to complacency as we try to comply with OGE's requirements for initial ethics orientation (5 C.F.R. § 2638.703). Getting feedback from trainees, or even better, having a neutral evaluator go through the training experience, can be an eye-opener. Here's a comment one new employee offered when asked about the initial ethics orientation offered by her agency:

As for my own experience with ethics training/the handout I received I have to say, it was pretty pathetic. If you look closely at the packet I was given, some of the pages are not even readable. I don’t know if the problem was with the printer or whatever, but it seems pretty useless to print out all those documents, if some of them, you can’t even read. There was basically no training whatsoever on ethics or the standards for things like breaks, lunches, what you should/should not talk about, etc. It was mostly a "give this a look" type thing.

Do you know how many new employees would rate your agency's initial ethics orientation as "pretty pathetic"?

Living In The Fishbowl

News media treatment of the recent bust of a phony diploma mill provides another illustration of the higher standards applied to federal employees.  As reported in USA Today and numerous other publications, the leader of the operation was sentenced to three years in prison for conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud. Her daughter was sentenced to a year in prison, and the family agreed to forfeit $535,000 in cash and their late-model Jaguar.

The diploma mill contained about 9,000 names in its customer database. Though only about a hundred or so of these names could be identified as federal employees, the headline for the USA Today story focused on those few:

Probe: Fed employees may have bought fake degrees

By this time, the news media pattern should be clear: Federal employees are favorite targets.  This unfortunate fact raises the already high stakes for ethics officers.

Getting In Touch With Us

An IEC member recently had trouble sending us an e-mail, possibly because her browser or e-mail program was not correctly configured. If your web browser and e-mail software are properly set up, then selecting the "Contact Us" or "Send Us Job Announcements" links in your web browser should cause your e-mail software to start a new message, addressed to us. If this does not work for you, you can use the following address to send general e-mail:

iecjournal123@yahoo.com

Use this address for job announcements:

iec.jobs@yahoo.com

These are "disposable" addresses; we'll change them if they begin attracting too much spam, and announce their replacements.

Hosting Political Events

The Fedmanager newsletter examines the issue of when a federal employee can host a political event at their home without violating the Hatch Act.

Role of Contractors in the Workplace

Government Executive has a story Across the Divide with some ideas on balancing the roles of contractors and civil servants. Their last bullet point sounds an awfully lot like the "code of conduct" for contractors advocated by OGE Director Ric Cusick. Our related post on GAO's view of contractor conflicts of interest and a link to OGE's course on working with contractors are available. Many posts on related topics are archived under the heading Contractors in the Workplace.

Update 9/20: Cecilia Owens points out that due to the OGE web site remodeling, there is an updated link to OGE's course mentioned above.

Organizational Conflicts of Interest

The Washington Post has a story about organizational conflicts of interest. Here's an exceprt:

The case offers a rare glimpse at one of the consequences of the government's unprecedented reliance on contractors to help federal agencies: Consultants sometimes gain insider knowledge and help draft rules that could benefit their own bottom lines, procurement specialists said.

Because the acquisition workforce has not kept pace with the massive expansion of outsourcing in recent years, such conflicts rarely come to light. When they do, the government often is not able to address the problems, specialists said.

"This is the top of the iceberg," said Daniel Guttman, a procurement specialist at Johns Hopkins University who brought the case to the government's attention. "The government has basically never publicly reviewed whether the conflict of interests rules work. They don't."

Thanks to Ellen Peterson for drawing this story to our attention and Eric Rishel for highlighting its significance.

Court of Claims finds DAEO determination arbitrary and capricious in excluding contract bidder

Court of Federal Claims found DAEO determination that contractor must be excluded from bid on contract because former employee had a post-government employment restriction was arbitrary and capricious.  See CNA Corp. v. US, No. 08-249C, 81 Fed. Cl. 722 (Apr. 30, 2008). 

Subsequent CFC post-award bid protest order goes into addition details.  See Download cfc_decision1.pdf

DOI Ten Point Ethics Plan

Incoming agency heads in some other agencies might get some useful ideas from the ten point list at the end of a Department of the Interior memo posted at the PEER web site.