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.