IEC Journal

New Employee Training Checklist

Department of the Treasury ethics officials have successfully used a new employee ethics training checklist for a couple of years now. They recently modified it to accommodate the additional information that political appointees covered by the Ethics Pledge need to know. One version is slightly less-detailed regarding the Pledge information. Here are links to download the MS Word files:

• Download NE Counseling Interview Sheet

• Download NE Counseling Brief 2-09

We appreciate Treasury for sharing these checklists, and we would love to receive material from other agencies.

Ethics Reminder Through Security Tip?

At least one federal agency provides employees a daily security tip when users log onto the computer network. If your IT deparment is agreeable, this can serve as an alternate delivery mechanism for ethics reminders, as demonstrated by this file.

"Preparing for a very rainy day" presentation from OGE Conference

Download preparing_for_a_very_rainy_day.ppt

Ethics challenges for Emergency Planners and Ethics Officials.

Ethics Training Storytelling Resources

Danielle Mozzetta's "Train the Trainer" program was one of the more effective sessions at the recent OGE conference. She stressed the importance of "storytelling" (i.e., providing real examples) as a way of increasing student retention, giving rise to the question, "But what if you don't know any relevant stories to tell the audience?"

Two good sources of instructional ethics examples are:

1. The Department of Defense Standards of Conduct Office's "Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure," acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal and others, and
2. This web site. We routinely link to news accounts of ethical transgressions. Our archives are searchable via by topics using our "Categories" system, linked at the left of every page or by key words using our search engine box in the upper right hand corner of every page.

Incidentally, note that the current search engine results page has advertisements inserted by the company that provides this service. We do not receive any revenue from them. We hope to install a search engine without ads in the not too distant future, but for the time being, this is the best we can do with our limited budget (basically, zero $). 

Education and Communication Award Winners

Congratulations to the winners of OGE's 2008 Education and Communication Award:

• Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
• Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
• Federal Emergency Management Agency
• Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
• Federal Trade Commission
• Office of the Director of National Intelligence
• Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation
• U.S. Agency for International Development
• U.S. Air Force
• U.S. Army, CECOM Life Cycle Management Command
• U.S. Department of Agriculture
• U.S. Department of the Interior
• U.S. Department of State
• U.S. Department of the Treasury – Departmental Offices

I hope to learn more about their achievements at this month's OGE conference, including “Ask Cagney the Ethics Dog.”

Whether or not you were a winner this year, if your organization has training aids that you think would benefit other agencies, please contact us about sharing them with the community through IEC Journal. Good ideas deserve wide circulation. You can always find our archive of training aids, sorted chronologically by the date posted, by selecting the category Training Aids in the left margin.

Fixing Broken OGE Web Site Links

At the request of Wayne Johnson, we have posted his revisions to the materials he provided for our Nov. 9. 2007 post on initial ethics training and our Jan. 22, 2008 post on SGE training.

While clearly a large improvement, the recent upgrade to the OGE web site had the unfortunate side effect of changing the URLs, or web page addresses, to many pages on the OGE site. This breaks the existing links that other web sites, including this one, have built to OGE. Due to resource constraints, we don't plan on correcting all the broken archived links to OGE pages. We will try to correct the most important ones that come to our attention (including the ones to OGE pages in the column at right, in the hopefully-not-too-distant future). If you are aware of a key link that should be changed, let us know.

We'll be publishing some advice on finding items on the revised OGE web page soon.

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"?

DOD OIG FOIA Reading Room

"It can't happen to me." Sound familiar?

Real life examples of high ranking officials whose disregard for ethics rules led to problems are one of the best ways to undercut this overconfident view.

The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General's Freedom of Information Act "Electronic Reading Room" is a good place to look for cautionary tales to use in training. It archives files expected to be the frequent subject of FOIA requests, thus saving the agency processing time and reducing access time for the public. The reports available there include the following:

"Alleged Improprieties Related To Public Speaking: Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, U.S. Army Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence", August 5, 2004

Alleged Misconduct: General Kevin P. Byrnes, U.S. Army Commanding General U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, July 29, 2005

Alleged Misconduct: Vice Admiral John D. Stufflebeem, U.S. Navy Director, Navy Staff, March 19, 2008

New OGE Crossword Puzzle Available

The newest OGE training crossword puzzle is on the subject of SF 278 Financial Disclosure. The DAEOgram announcing it has information on system requirements.

Share the Wealth at OGE Conference

Have you developed training-related materials, automation programs, procedures, or job aids that could be useful to other ethics offices? OGE is providing a place to share such resources at its "Products to Share Exhibit" at the 2008 National Government Ethics Conference in Orlando, Florida. Those interested in participating should contact Ciara Guzman by July 18th:

cmguzman _ AT_ oge _DOT_ gov

(Address disguised to throw off spammers).