I originally wrote this column for Civil Beat back in August 2013 (“Hawaii Monitor – Stories from the ‘Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure’“).

If you occasionally find yourself wondering about kind of unethical mischief public officials can get tangled up in, or if you’re an official hoping to steer clear of potential ethical misdeeds, you should definitely take a look at a little known report prepared by the Department of Defense General Counsel’s Standards of Conduct office.

“The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure” is a compendium of stories drawn from actual cases of employees and officials in various federal agencies who have run aground on ethics laws. Its vignettes are sometimes entertaining and funny, but most often mind-boggling in their stupidity. It’s updated annually and, most importantly, it’s available as a free download.

The cases run the gamut from complex criminal frauds to more mundane ethical lapses.

Now, nearly 12 years later, nothing has changed except that the collection of examples of unethical actions has continued to grow from the original 163 pages to the 260-page update published in January 2025.

Dive in anywhere to see the range of ethical lapses, the circumstances in which they occur, and the penalties when they are discovered.

Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure (Updated January 2025) by Ian Lind on Scribd