TOPICS
TOPICS
Study: Ethical breaches becoming common in government
"While government misconduct is high, it's likely to get worse," Patricia Harned said. "We believe that the next Enron could take place in the public sector. At present, government lacks many of the important interventions that could reduce this risk."
The National Government Ethics Survey, conducted June 25-Aug. 15, 2007, included responses from 774 federal, state and local government employees, and had a margin of error of 3.5 percent. It was the first time ERC broke out government employee responses from its larger survey of public and private sector employees, which included 3,452 in 2007.
Harned said the survey found that 52 percent of government employees reported witnessing some kind of misconduct by co-workers in 2006. In addition, 23 percent said they saw or experienced abusive behavior, 21 percent witnessed safety violations and 20 percent knew someone who had lied to their colleagues or was involved in a possible conflict of interest.
Most reports of misconduct involved ethical breaches, rather than legal violations, according to ERC.
Government employees as a whole reported 3 percent more incidents of falsifying or altering documents and 4 percent more incidents of lying to employees than their private sector counterparts did.
Harned said reporting misconduct was up 12 percent from 2005, from 58 percent to 70 percent. Eighty-nine percent of employees made their reports to an individual, rather than anonymously to a hotline, and usually approached lower-level local managers and not top officials in organizations.
"It's very likely that higher levels of management are unaware that misconduct is even a problem within their organization," she said.
Despite an increase in reporting, Harned said, government misconduct at all levels was likely to worsen, with 25 percent of employees saying they worked in situations that were conducive to wrongdoing and 48 percent saying they encountered situations that invited unethical behavior.
One solution would be to implement strong ethics programs paired with efforts by organizational leaders to develop ethical cultures, Harned said. According to ERC's report, only 30 percent of employees reported that their agency had a strong ethics program and 10 percent said their agency had a strong ethical culture.
Those numbers are particularly worrying because ethics programs can double reporting of misconduct and eliminate misconduct by as much as 25 percent. "The implications of this research are serious. Public trust is at risk," she said. "The public trusts that government leaders have strong ethics leaders and make sure they're carried out throughout their organizations.... In setting standards, the government must look at itself."
COMMENTS
- Since 1992, here at one of the "smallest/least viable" offices in USEPA, I witnessed blatant abuse in hiring and promotion practices clearly in violation of ethics rules. Starting from the office director level down to the division and deputy division director, where friends and cronies are given the answer to the “Selection Criteria” and once on board, they’re fast tracked to the highest grade levels if not the SES corp. One might say this is a mild abuse, but one could also think of the consequences, where the practice is repeated many times over and before long, the taxpayer is footing a bill for under performing/deserving civil servants. Between salaries, awards, and bonuses, it all adds up to a hefty retirement supported by unwittingly younger generations. As implied in one of the comments, “Ethics” is a foreign language word unbeknown to many senior government officials. OpenBook Personnel ActnsAbsuses Posted February 27, 2008 3:24 PM
- I have been in government more that 30 years and seen unethical behavior become the culture of the organization. I wrote a paper for my master's certificate in Business Ethics on Developing an Ethics Program: Pubic vs Private. The overall results was that ethics in the public sector could not servive because of politics and lack of punishment for unethical behavior. Until we have leadership that will walk the walk and talk the talk the culture will not change. I remain hopeful because their are more people in government that want ethical leaders and governence than those that don't. CONSTANCE ROYSTER Posted February 15, 2008 8:24 PM
- I'm speechless. Why even write this article? Nothing will ever be done about this, at least not fairly, and not across the board. If you really get into this, you'll find that senior leaders have breed this environment over the years (I watched it for 33 years). The higher your position, the more unethical the person. Retired DOD Business Analyst Posted February 11, 2008 9:58 AM
