Law Commons^™

New York State's Innovative New Program For Risk Management: Bringing Leading Private Sector Practice To Government, Office Of New York State Governor Andrew M. Cuomo

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

On January 21, 2015, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo implemented New York’s first statewide system for risk management. Designed to identify, manage and mitigate vulnerabilities in the areas of ethics, risk and compliance, this system ensures that efficient and responsive government services are provided to New York’s almost 20 million residents.

The size, scope and complexity of New York’s operations demanded the implementation of a risk management system. New York’s government includes a fiscal year 2016 operating budget of $94.25 billion, 110 executive agencies and authorities with over 224,000 employees, $198 billion in contracts, and $35 billion in federal benefits programs. …

Suppressing Bid Rigging: Lessons From Japan, Takaki Soto

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Bid rigging is a form of procurement fraud that occurs when participants in a bidding process for public contracts conspire to undermine the integrity or transparency of the process, sometimes with the complicity of public officials. Common examples of violations include collusion among bidders to fix a common price, requests for proposals deliberately and unnecessarily tailored so that only select bidders can meet their requirements, and lowballed bids with hidden costs and fees.

In Japan, where corruption is generally perceived to be relatively rare, bid rigging—nyusatsu dango—is a persistent and problematic form of public corruption. In many cases, …

How To Craft A Powerful Annual Report, Amy Kurland

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

To an oversight agency, an annual report is more than a financial statement. At the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the City of Philadelphia, we view our annual report as an opportunity to increase awareness of our office, to encourage public reporting, and to deter wrongdoing. Because most investigations originate from tips submitted by citizens, we see community engagement as critical to our success.

In our years of report writing, we have gained a lot of experience about what works and what does not work, and we have distilled that experience into six basic lessons for maximizing the …

The Conviction Of Alabama House Speaker Michael Hubbard, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Hubbard is the former speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives. First elected in 1998, he represented Auburn in the state legislature and served as House Minority leader from 2004 to 2010. As chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, Hubbard spearheaded his party’s successful effort to win control of both chambers of the state legislature for the first time in 136 years. In 2010, he was unanimously elected speaker and helped pass ethics laws considered among the nation’s strictest.

Profile In Public Integrity: David Harper, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

David Harper was appointed as the Inspector General of Albuquerque, New Mexico, this past April. Prior to becoming Inspector General, Harper served for over three decades in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), conducting and overseeing financial investigations resulting in recoveries of over one billion dollars. Most recently, he served as AFOSI’s Chief of Economic Crimes Investigations. In that capacity, he directed staff support to the more than 200 AFOSI field and regional offices and oversaw over 500 financial crime investigations. Harper previously served as Special Agent-in-Charge of the AFOSI regional office in Boston, Massachusetts. He holds a …

Profile In Public Integrity: Cynthia Carrasco, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Before becoming the Inspector General for the state of Indiana, Cynthia Carrasco was the executive director of the Indiana Ethics Commission. In 2015, she was named one of Indiana’s “Forty Under 40” by the Indianapolis Business Journal. A graduate of the Indiana University (IU) Robert H. McKinney School of Law, she serves as a volunteer for the IU Latino Alumni Association and the Indiana University Health Patient-Family Advisory Council.

Profile In Public Integrity: Heather Holt, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Heather Holt is in her sixth year as the Executive Director of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission. Before joining the Ethics Commission in 2006 as the Director of Policy and Legislation, Holt served as an ethics officer for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She has served as legal and policy counsel to several cities in San Diego County, the United States House of Representatives, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and the Maine State Legislature. She has also served as the director of a nonprofit agency that provides assistance to military families. A Southern California native, Holt holds …

The False Claims Act: A Useful Tool In The Fight Against Public Corruption, John Carroll

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

When most people think of the available tools in the fight against public corruption, they think of the criminal laws and courts, or the oversight provided by government watchdog agencies. The False Claims Act (or FCA) provides another way in which public integrity can be enhanced, and it is a tool that has many advantages. First, the FCA is a civil statute, which means that as compared to criminal litigation, the FCA requires a lower burden of proof, and carries the possibility of a high damages award. Second, the False Claims Act permits citizen watchdogs to bring claims that the …

Landscape Assessment: Survey Of The Practitioners, Offices, And Agencies Charged With Upholding Public Integrity Across The United States, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

The United States has a decentralized system of anti-corruption oversight unique in the world. Rather than a single national anti-corruption agency, an array of state, local, and federal offices have evolved to safeguard public integrity through both enforcement and oversight, including ethics commissions, inspectors general, ombudsman offices, and specialized prosecutorial and investigative units. Most of these offices were created by state and local governments in the last 25 years, often in response to citizen demands for efficiency and accountability in the public sector following a scandal.1 In the last decade alone, local corruption scandals have prompted cities like Houston, Philadelphia, …

Leveraging Resources And Relationships In Joint Corruption Investigations, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Prosecutors and investigators pursuing corruption cases need all the help they can get. Detecting and proving public integrity violations can require hours of work, specialized expertise, and sometimes expensive software or surveillance equipment. Collaboration across agency lines can be a force multiplier, bringing additional resources, expertise, and legal tools. Strong partnerships can also provide critical cover in politically sensitive cases, helping investigative agencies weather the storm and diffuse political risks.

This paper is intended to provide practical insights about the benefits and nuances of inter-agency cooperation on public integrity cases, as well as anticipated challenges. The paper ends with two …

Does Seeking Cell Site Location Information Require A Search Warrant?: The Current State Of The Law In A Rapidly Changing Field, Wesley Cheng

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

In 2015, a divided panel of the Fourth Circuit ruled in United States v. Graham that the collection of cell site location information (CSLI) without a search warrant was an unreasonable intrusion under the Fourth Amendment. With Graham, the Fourth Circuit split from all of the other circuits to have decided this question. Earlier this year, however, on May 31, 2016, an en banc Fourth Circuit reversed course, holding contrary to the original Fourth Circuit decision in United States v. Graham that a warrant is not required for CSLI.

With the new en banc decision the Fourth Circuit now …

Prison Corruption: The Problem And Some Potential Solutions, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Corruption occurs in the American prison system in a variety of forms. In the most basic version, correction officers accept bribes or sexual favors to smuggle weapons, drugs, or cell phones to inmates, or to provide inmates with other benefits. Other kinds of prison corruption can involve higher-level prison officials. For example, some prison officials have been implicated in pay-to-play schemes with private prisons. In other cases prison supervisors and administrators have been accused of covering up violations by correction officers or others within the prison, such as by shielding human rights abuses.

The Integrity Monitor Program: The Role Of The Private Sector In City Contract Oversight, New York City Department Of Investigation (Doi)

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

New York City’s Department of Investigation (DOI) is responsible for overseeing thousands of contracts between the City and private firms, worth more than $14 billion annually. To fulfil this mandate, DOI vets every City contract and conducts regular audits and investigations to detect and address potential instances of waste, fraud, abuse, or corruption.

Certain City contracts may require extra oversight due to their nature, scale, or exigency or concerns about a contractor’s past record of performance. In such cases, DOI might require contractors to comply with a regime of closer scrutiny and more regimented oversight to deter misconduct and detect …

An Honest Day's Work: Regulating State Lawmakers' Outside Income, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

The practice of permitting legislators to earn outside income, income apart from compensation for service in office, is a frequent battlefield in the fight against legislative corruption in the United States. Critics of the practice argue that such income creates potential conflicts of interest, pitting legislators’ personal pecuniary interests against the public interest. As public servants, legislators should not be accountable to other paymasters and should not use their legislative positions to enrich themselves beyond their official salary. On the other hand, legislators point out that their positions are generally low-paid and part-time, and that they have the right—perhaps …

An Overview Of State And Local Anti-Corruption Oversight In The United States, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

The United States has a decentralized system of anti-corruption oversight unique in the world. Instead of a national anti-corruption agency, like most countries, the federal government has a profusion of institutions including the Government Accountability Office in the legislative branch, the Office of Government Ethics in the executive branch, and more than 70 inspectors general responsible for monitoring a specific department or program.

At the state level, the oversight landscape is even more variegated. Some states, cities, and counties have multiple agencies while others have one or none at all. Some watchdog agencies have large staffs with sweeping investigative powers, …

Strategies For Increasing And Improving Public Corruption Prosecutions: The Task Force Model, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Without a doubt, public corruption is the sort of crime that prosecutors and investigators everywhere would like to vigorously pursue. With the limited resources available to most of these offices and competing mandates to fight many other sorts of crime, however, how can offices expand their ability to do more corruption cases? One solution can be found in banding together as a task force. This brief provides examples of task forces around the country that could serve as models for an office or a jurisdiction looking to improve their capabilities to fight corruption effectively and efficiently.

What Is Asset Tracing? A Primer On "Following The Money" For Integrity Practitioners And Policymakers, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

To put it simply, asset tracing is the process by which investigators “follow the money.” Investigators trace assets by conducting financial investigations, during which they determine a subject’s assets, examine the revenue generated by criminal activity, and follow its trail.

Mexico City's Citizen Comptroller Program, Patricio Martinez Llompart

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Since 1997, Mexico City has had an autonomous, elected government responsible for meeting the needs of nearly nine million metropolitan citizens. Controlling corruption has been a key public priority. In 2004, the city government passed the Citizen Participation Act (Ley de Participación Ciudadana), which established a landmark program to enlist citizen volunteers directly in the day-to-day work of procurement oversight.

These trained volunteers, called “citizen comptrollers,” act as ground-level watchdogs to observe and evaluate public contracting processes. The “bottom up” approach to municipal anti-corruption control pioneered by the Citizen Comptrollers program can serve as an innovative model for cities and …

Ingredients For An Effective Public Ethics Training Program, Alicia Olmstead, Sabine Romero

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Most of us will agree that ethics training is vital to ensuring a government whose employees act with integrity. But many employees find training on their ethical obligations to be some other things as well: difficult to understand, overly preachy, or just plain boring. We all know that people retain information better when it is presented in an interesting and memorable way. The challenge with ethics training is to take this important, but not always accessible, subject matter and make it stick in the minds of government employees so that they do the right thing when facing an ethical dilemma.

What Do Corrupt Firms Have In Common? Red Flags Of Corruption In Organizational Culture, Alison Taylor

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

What kind of an organizational culture do corrupt companies tend to have? To answer this question, I conducted a study based on a review of academic literature as well as in-depth interviews with 23 prominent lawyers, investigators, scholars, and policymakers with firsthand knowledge of the inner workings of dozens of corrupt firms. They highlighted a number of common traits often missed by standard compliance processes that might be “red flags” for organizational corruption. These traits don’t guarantee corruption within an organization, but they do point to the conditions in which it thrives.

Asset Forfeiture In Public Corruption Cases, Pamela S. Stanek

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

This publication is intended to be a practical guide to pursuing federal asset forfeiture where a public corruption crime is the underlying offense. Although the reader of this guide may be pursuing state crimes and forfeiture, reaching out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the experts in public corruption cases, is recommended. Addressing the laws of all fifty states is beyond the scope of this guide. Nonetheless, the considerations and guidance underlying federal forfeiture will generally apply to the pursuit of state forfeitures as the majority of the state statutes are modeled after the federal statutes and involve similar …

Senator Menendez And The Speech And Debate Clause, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Robert “Bob” Menendez is a United States Senator from New Jersey. He was appointed to the Senate in 2006 by newly elected Governor John Corzine to fill Corzine’s vacated seat. Menendez served two years as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, from 2013 to 2015, and remained that committee’s ranking Democrat until his indictment. He is also a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs and the Committee on Finance. Between 1993 and 2006, Menendez represented New Jersey’s 13th district in the United States House of Representatives.

The Conviction Of Congressman Chaka Fattah, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Congressman Chaka Fattah has represented Pennsylvania’s 2nd District, which includes parts of Philadelphia, for 20 years.

On June 21, 2016, Congressman Fattah was convicted on all 23 counts of public corruption he faced, including conspiracy to commit racketeering (RICO), bribery, money laundering, and fraud. Fattah’s four co-defendants included his chief of staff as well as a former Philadelphia deputy mayor.

A Practitioner's Guide To Wiretaps In Public Corruption Investigations, Wesley Cheng

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

The nonconsensual interception of wire, oral, or electronic communications of targets in criminal investigations is a powerful law enforcement tool and can be used to great effect in many cases, including public corruption cases. Indeed, particularly in cases where wrongful behavior is covert – as is often the case when public officials are involved – there is great value to evidence that allows prosecutors to use the defendant’s own recorded words against him in the courtroom. But there are many factors to consider before using this labor-intensive, long-term tool in your corruption investigation, and once a decision has been made …

The Rikers Island Smuggling Bust, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Rikers Island is New York City’s primary jail complex, with a daily inmate population of approximately 10,000. The 400-acre complex consists of ten different jails that can hold up to 15,000 inmates in total. Rikers has come under criticism as a rise in violent attacks, between inmates and against corrections officers, has drawn public attention to perceived systemic corruption, abuses, and a culture of violence within the complex.

The Arrest Of Norman Seabrook And The Nypd Corruption Probe, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Since 1995, Norman Seabrook has served as president of the New York City Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association (COBA), the largest municipal jail union in the U.S. with a membership of more than 9,000. As president, Seabrook controls the union’s finances, including its welfare fund. COBA’s welfare fund, which supports benefits for members like dental care and prescription drug purchases, is funded by New York City as part of the union employees’ compensation packages.

The Trial Of Congressman Chaka Fattah, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Congressman Chaka Fattah has represented Pennsylvania’s 2nd District, which includes parts of Philadelphia, for 20 years.

On July 29, 2015, a federal Grand Jury indicted Congressman Fattah on 29 counts, including conspiracy to commit racketeering (RICO), bribery, money laundering, and fraud. The charges encompassed four co-conspirators as well, including Fattah’s chief of staff as well as a former Philadelphia deputy mayor.

Profile In Public Integrity: Robert Lafrenière, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Robert Lafrenière is the Commissioner of Quebec’s Permanent Anti-Corruption Unit (l’Unité permanente anticorruption, or UPAC), which he has led since its creation in 2011. In early 2016, he was appointed to a second five-year term. Prior to UPAC, Lafrenière served for two years as Deputy Minister of Quebec’s Ministry of Public Safety (ministère de la Sécurité publique du Québec, or MSP). Earlier in his career, Lafrenière served in Quebec’s provincial police force (Sûreté du Québec), and taught policing at the Collège de Maisonneuve in Montreal.

Profile In Public Integrity: Hubert Sparks, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Hubert Sparks was appointed the first inspector general of the Appalachian Regional Commission in 1989 and was also the first inspector general of the Denali Commission. Previously, Sparks served 29 years in oversight roles at Offices of the Inspector General at the Departments of Agriculture, Homeland Security, and Veteran’s Affairs. He is a member of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency and served on the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Sparks holds a B.B.A. in accounting from the City College of New York.

Profile In Public Integrity: Josh Silver, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Josh Silver is the director of Represent.Us, a non-profit grassroots organization that advocates for anti-corruption legislation in states and local communities nationwide. Previously, he co-founded and led Free Press, a public interest organization that advocates for media and technology reform. Earlier, Silver served as the campaign manager for the successful Arizona Clean Elections ballot initiative in 1998, and also directed development for the cultural arm of the Smithsonian Institution.