Here’s a brief look at some of the recent ethics stories from around the country.
Here at home….”Commission Issues Advisory Opinion 2012-1 Relating to State Board Member’s Conflicts of Interests Question”
Commission finds that a potential conflict of interest is too indirect to pose an issue.
“Ethics legislation: Limit dollar distractions,” Atlanta Journal Constitution. Arguing for caps on gifts to legislators from lobbyists.
Disclosure, yes, is good. But it is not enough. Not when House Speaker David Ralston and family members are treated to a $17,000 junket to see Europe’s high-speed rail system. This in a state loath to fund any transportation option not involving asphalt.
Then there was Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle’s $5,000 trip to a golf tournament on St. Simons Island last October. His stay at the ritzy Cloister resort and a round of golf were paid for by lobbyists for a for-profit cancer hospital.
Both examples are perfectly legal, given the status quo. Common sense says that should change and implementing a $100 gift cap for lobbyists is a good place to start.
But legislators aren’t too keen on the idea.
“Ethics bill gets cool reception in Ga. House,” Chris Joyner and Christopher Quinn, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Godwin, co-founder of Georgia Conservatives in Action, was part of a dozen or so grassroots conservatives on hand to support an ethics bill that would limit the spending of lobbyists and PACs. But there was little GOP backing for the bill: Republicans control both General Assembly chambers, but sponsor Rep. Tommy Smith, R-Nicholls, could not find a single co-sponsor in his party.
“New ethics panel to consider sanctions for violations, putting disclosure forms online,” AP story in the Washington Post.
Hawaii already puts its financial disclosure forms online, and has for years. Credit where credit is due.
“Ex-regulator for SEC defends his ethics,” By David S. Hilzenrath, washington post
A former Securities and Exchange Commission official has agreed to pay a $50,000 fine for going through the “revolving door” and working with an alleged Ponzi scheme mastermind, R. Allen Stanford, after allegedly taking part in SEC decisions not to investigate him, the Justice Department said Friday.
“In state of the state address, Rick Snyder to call for ethics reform, improved customer service,” Detroit Free Press.
Sources said Snyder will discuss:
• The need to strengthen laws on lobbying, campaign finance, ethics and transparency, including the need to address issues raised in two Free Press reports about officials who left state government to work for companies they dealt with in official capacities.
“Maine Ethics Commission Authorizes Casino Funding Probe,” The Maine Public Broadcasting Network. With gambling before the Hawaii legislature again, here’s a cautionary note.
The investigation was prompted by a complaint from Dennis Bailey of the group CasinosNO! Bailey told commissioners that toward the end of the campaign he came into possession of a proposed option agreement between the Lewiston financial partners in the casino and a Maryland-based outfit called M-Five.
Bailey says it included a provision that M-Five “shall develop, plan, manage and pay for any campaign efforts to cause the passage of the 2011 statewide ballot measure.” It also stipulated that M-Five would contract with Dome Messaging of Arlington, Virginia, for advertising and polling, and contribute at least $100,000 to one of the casino PACs.
“M-Five doesn’t show up on their campaign finance,” Bailey says. “It’s a group called GT Source, a Georgia casino company, whose president is also an officer with M-Five.”
“New London ethics board’s bizarre attempt to punish free speech,” Paul Choiniere, the day.com (Connecticut).
This case is similar to the situation I found myself in years ago, which led to a 9th Circuit Court decision that a complainant’s right to speak about a complaint filed with a public agency is protected by the First Amendment.
See Lind v. Grimmer (1994)
“Deutsche Analyst Sounded Alarm When Asked to Alter Numbers,” Carrick Mollenkamp, Special to ProPublica
At a time when mortgage-backed securities were imploding and customers were fleeing the market, a junior analyst at Deutsche Bank AG protested when he was asked to alter the numbers in a spreadsheet to make a Deutsche security look less risky to ratings agencies, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
The analyst, this person said, was asked by a mid-level Deutsche executive in late 2007 to make it appear that the investment would produce more cash than the bank actually expected at certain time points.
The request came at a crucial moment. In the last months of 2007, investors had grown skittish about such investments amid signs that the housing bubble was deflating, if not bursting. Up and down Wall Street, banks were trying to persuade ratings agencies that large portions of their mortgage-backed securities merited the coveted AAA stamp, meaning that they posed negligible risks of default. The analyst was asked to alter the spreadsheets in order to get a better rating, the person said.
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There is an Ethics Bill discussed at the City Council yesterday. Patty Teruya was probably the most public resignation recently. But you can be sure there must be choke ethics problem at the Honolulu Zoo.
I suppose you could have laws, rules, policies, regulations, etc., up the wazoo but, ultimately, it comes down to the smell test. If it smells bad, it probably is.
Ian, you are of course right about public disclosures long being on the Web site of the Hawaii State Ethics Commission–when I was director of the Hawaii State Ethics Commission we put public financial disclosures on our Web site in late 1998, I believe. We must have been one of the first three agencies in the country to do this, though at the time I was not aware of whether anyone else was doing this or not–just seemed to be the right thing to do, and these were public documents. After that, it was my intention that all of our public documents be posted on-line and soon as we were able (there are many different kinds of documents and lots of them–credit Patrick Lui of the Commission with getting all of this done regarding the later documents quite quickly), which eventually happened. I have always believed that such accessibility to these public records is a good thing for state officials and employees (our 800 or so more formal opinions are on the Web site), the people of Hawaii, people on the neighbor islands, and the media. It also helped people view documents without traveling to our office. That all ethics agencies do not do this seems a little odd at this point. As for your free speech case in 1994, as you know, you were dealing with a misdemeanor law at the Campaign Spending Commission, while ours was a felony. Some top people wanted me to go after those who had filed charges against them and spoke about it publicly, but I told them that my view was that they should go to the prosecutor, since it was a criminal matter, and outside the ethics laws we enforced, which were all civil laws, not criminal. The law also applied to us staff and Commissioners as well. Anyway, as you know, the Commission and I believed the law was unconstitutional as to the public’s filing charges, and before it was challenged in our office, we had introduced a bill to change the law, but it did not pass. As you probably recall, around 1971 a well respected Big Island judge (Shunichi Kimura) struck down a similar law the Big Island’s Ethics Board had as violating free speech. I always wondered why that decision never seemed to come to be commonly known. Might have saved us all a lot of trouble. The Hawaii State Ethics Commission appears to have been the first “state” ethics commission in the country–something Hawaii should be proud of, and something to be further enhanced, and I hope not diminished. Though the Hawaii State Ethics Commission was probably the first “state” commission, it appears New York City had the first ethics board, followed either by Honolulu’s Ethics Board, or the Big Island’s ethics board. All of this goes back to the early and mid-sixties, and the Hawaii State Ethics Commission’s Laws were passed in 1967. Let’s hope that we continue to enhance our ethics and lobbying laws, and that these laws are rigorously enforced by the State Ethics Commission via formal, contested case hearings for serious, provable (these are laws) infractions.
i love that name CasinosNO! really gets the point across, for sure.