“It Always Starts with Picking Up the Dry Cleaning” — How Unethical Conduct Metastasizes by Marianne M. Jennings
We think of the dedicated public servants who have helped us, and we are grateful for their work. However, those dedicated public servants often find themselves in difficult ethical dilemmas. Confronting government officials about violations of policies, rules and laws is a tall order. Not confronting them means ethical lapses blossoming into more lapses and eventually into a scandal that provides no one with a face-saving solution and always results in harm to more people than we could have anticipated. The simplest forms of unethical conduct often metastasize because no action was taken when that conduct began or because the right tools were not being used to detect the conduct. The following three issue areas illustrate the problem. “It Always Starts With Picking Up the Dry Cleaning” Those are the words of Lisa Gilbert of Public Citizen (a Washington, D.C. advocacy group). Gilbert was referring to the ethical downfalls of so many public officials, a downfall that begins with high-ranking officials asking members of their security detail or staff to pick up their dry cleaning. The act of having someone else pick up your clothes at the dry cleaners seems to be the gateway drug to misuse of public resources and funds. Errand-running seems like such a small thing, but it constitutes, in the words of Robin Thicke (or Marvin Gaye, depending on how copyright law is applied), a “blurred line.” John Conyers (formerly D-Michigan), Scott Pruitt (former head of
the EPA), David Shulken (former head of the VA), Mike Pompeo (Secretary of State), and many more have faced misuse of staff issues, resulting in inspector general investigations and headlines. (See Carl Hulse, “Why Clean Shirts Become the Stuff of Dirty Laundry,” New York Times, May 20, 2020) Addressing ethical issues from an angle of equality strikes a nerve with government officials. The staff member cannot do errands on government time. They would be disciplined for doing so. Yet demands by their bosses are asking staff members to violate government rules. The little request looks different from this perspective. Government officials and staff members should also be given ethics training on the effective use of options. Instead of staff members just saying “Okay,” and rolling their eyes as they walk away to the dry cleaners, they can offer options, e.g., “I am sure that we could have your dry cleaning delivered.” That option should be offered with consequences other government officials have experienced because they began asking staff for such simple requests. Most importantly, staff members need training to understand and accept the significant role they play in sharing their experiences with their bosses to keep them, their agencies and themselves out of the headlines. There is also an issue of human dignity that is not included in most ethics training. Educated and trained staff members were not hired for their ability to run errands. Nor do members of the public expect that their salaries would go to such purposes. There is one more piece of training that should focus on the trump card. Staff members actually wield the ultimate power when they are forced to succumb to these simplest of requests. They now have information that officials do not want to be known publicly. So, the moral of the story and the basics of this new ethics training is to use caution in how we treat those who we perceive cannot harm us. They can, in fact, hold the trump card. When this type of small “stuff” is managed, the blossoming stops. Pick up the
NOV./DEC. 2020 AZ CPA
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