Carol Carson was appointed by the Citizens Ethics Advisory Board to serve as the Executive Director of the Connecticut Office of State Ethics in December 2007. She was brought on after the resignation of Ben Bycel, the previous head administrator who had received a poor evaluation because, among other things, he needed to improve staff relations and communications. Since Carol’s arrival the Office of State Ethics experienced the resignation of its Board Chair, Kenneth Bernhard, for violations of the ethics code. But the last two years have also seen great improvements at the agency. Under Carol’s leadership, the staff has begun auditing public official’s statements of financial interest for the first time and has undertaken the cataloguing of the agency’s voluminous advisory opinions into a cross-referenced database. The OSE has also made a point of reaching out to the public and the regulated community with seminars and forums to ensure that everyone is informed about the provisions of the code. I asked Carol to reflect on her first two years at the Office of State Ethics and to talk a little about the projects she is looking forward to tackling next.
When you came on as Executive Director at the OSE, the agency had just experienced a tumultuous period. What steps did you take to regain the confidence of the staff, board members and the public, both early on and especially after Chairman Bernhard’s resignation? How did your experience at the Massachusetts Ethics Commission and as a reporter help you during that period?
When I arrived in December 2007, I became employee number 12 in an agency that was supposed to have 21 employees. My first task was hiring employees. Between my arrival and May 2008 when Governor Rell instituted a hiring freeze, two office assistants, an IT technician, two investigators and a business/human resources manager joined the staff. I had the support of a capable and dedicated Board and staff from the start; they were looking forward to becoming the agency the OSE was meant to be and eager to work toward that goal. With staff in place, gaining confidence became a matter of getting things done and getting them done right. This was true in the beginning and also true following Chairman Bernhard’s resignation.
Gaining confidence is an ongoing effort and, frankly, time is our best friend. The more we get it right, the more Connecticut citizens - and the public officials, state employees, lobbyists, state contractors and others who deal with us directly - are confident that we will continue to do so.
We quickly moved from being an agency “fixing to get ready to start doing something,” as one person reported to me when I arrived, to being an agency focusing on and executing its mission. One early focus was the IT systems. Both the lobbyist filing system and the statements of financial interests system were older systems, created before the turn of the century, and they gave us cause for concern. By the end of 2008, we totally revamped and implemented these systems. After the learning curve was conquered, most users were positive about the changes. We continue to make changes to make the systems as useful and user-friendly as possible.
My experience in Massachusetts provided me with the knowledge and a deep conviction that most public officials, state employees, state contractors and lobbyists are like most people in Connecticut: they get up every morning, go to work and try to do the best job they can. For those people, the role of the OSE is to provide education, guidance and advice. For the minority of people who aren’t able or willing to comply with the law, the agency’s role is to fairly and vigorously enforce the law.
You and the staff have made a concerted effort to increase the agency’s educational outreach. Specifically, what new programs have you instituted for both lobbyists and state employees and how would you like to augment those activities going forward?
We began reaching out to the media, to elected and appointed state officials and employees in a variety of ways. We increased our media contacts and consistently sent out press releases. We began using our website to create more transparency by adding useful historical and new material to it - for example, we created reports such as the State of Lobbying Report and the Lobbyist Audit Report to inform the public about the information we collect related to lobbying. We stepped up our communications with state agency ethics liaisons and compliance officers to ensure that our message about the Code of Ethics and the role of the OSE in administering it were spreading throughout the regulated community. For lobbyists, we began pre-session warm-up and post-session wrap-up meetings that bookend each legislative session to communicate directly to lobbyists. Last session we provided a “Lobbying 101″ session that, because of its success, will become an annual event.
In addition to conducting in-person trainings, we have a streaming video, DVDs and online training available. This past year, we began offering quarterly roundtables in our office addressing specific topics in addition to our quarterly general training sessions. Our new filing systems are e-mail based, which allows us to keep lobbyists, state employees and public officials informed. The filing systems generate reminders of filing deadlines, giving us the opportunity to help people get it right, rather than catch them getting it wrong. This year, we are again sponsoring Ethics Day in the fall. We will continue to do what works and find more and better opportunities to reach out. In particular, these challenging budgetary times are driving us to seek low-cost (or even no-cost solutions), particularly using technology.
Connecticut’s budget is obviously is dire straits. How has this impacted the functions of the OSE and what mechanisms have you put into place for what will certainly be an even worse year in 2011?
The ongoing hiring freeze prevented us from hiring three employees in FY 2010 and the mid-term adjustments to the FY 2011 budget permanently removed those positions. While Conn. Gen. Stat. § 1-81a provides the OSE with protection against unilateral reductions to our budget by the Governor, the OSE, in cooperation with the Office of Policy and Management, has acted prudently in its operation and, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, over $280,000, approximately 15% of our FY 2010 budget, was returned to the general fund.
Employee salaries make up over 80% of our FY 2011 budget of $1.9 million. As in any small state agency, our employees take on multiple tasks to get everything done. In addition to careful fiscal management and prudent spending, we have focused efforts on cross-training our employees so that we can quickly and efficiently respond to different demands on the agency. Luckily, we have low employee turnover which translates into very experienced employees who are committed to our mission. For instance, during the lobbyist registration and financial reporting periods as well as the annual May 1 deadline for filing financial disclosure forms, a sizeable percentage of staff members are assigned to respond to questions and provide assistance to filers.
The statutory ‘firewall’ between the legal division and the enforcement division, which obligates the OSE to clearly separate advisory and enforcement functions, makes these efforts at cross-training a challenge at times and significant future budget cuts may impact our ability to provide services.
The OSE is charged with “enforcement of ethics provisions for legislators, state employees and lobbyists, issuing opinions to guide ethical conduct of the regulated community, and administering the lobbyist disclosure system and the financial disclosure system for public officials and state employees.” In what areas does the agency find the most violations of the code? Are there portions of the code that you would like to see simplified, further defined or improved?
Violations of the Code of Ethics and questions from people seeking advice to comply with it don’t generally fall into a single area - they are all over the place. However, they can be driven by a number of factors, including state policy and the calendar. For example, last year’s early retirement program for state employees resulted in a large spike in questions about post-employment restrictions and financial disclosure reporting for departing officials; often, a second wave of allegations follows such a spike in questions. The recession, perhaps, has contributed to an increased number of questions about outside employment. We see more violations for failing to register as a lobbyist during the first half of the year when the General Assembly is in session and late filing of reports follows the quarterly reporting deadlines as well as more violations of late filings related to marshal statements of income and public official and state employee statements of financial interests in late spring/early summer after the May 1 deadline. On occasion, it seems that a series of violations are focused on a specific area of the law; this may be the result of an OSE press release detailing a violation generating additional allegations of similar conduct.
The OSE legislative proposals submitted to the General Assembly in both 2009 and 2010 contain a number of changes to clarify and simplify the Code of Ethics, along with a number of technical amendments. Some of the proposals include:
- necessary changes to the governance of the Citizen’s Ethics Advisory Board
- increasing the threshold for lobbyist registrations from $2,000 to $3,000
- adding state employees to lobbyists’ reporting of gifts
- including the term “candidate for public office” to two gift exceptions
- clarifying lobbyist registration and reporting requirements by those who lobby “within the scope of employment.”
- Providing the OSE with authority to interpret Parts III and IV of the Code of Ethics, which the enforcement division presently has the authority to enforce
Unfortunately, a political stalemate about the creation of a standing legislative ethics committee, which has no direct impact on the Code of Ethics or the OSE, resulted in no action by the General Assembly on these important changes during the last two sessions.
Now that the legislature is out of session, what projects are you working on this summer to improve the agency’s efficiency?
Records management has been an ongoing project. The OSE is an agency approaching its fifth anniversary and inherited over 25 years of precedent from the former State Ethics Commission. Identifying what records we have, what records we must keep and what can be destroyed, then managing what is left, including scanning documents for electronic access, continues this summer. For example, earlier this year, we posted summaries online of 37 declaratory rulings issued by the previous Commission. By the end of the summer, summaries of all advisory opinions will be posted online with links to the opinions. Currently, while all of the advisory opinions are available online, only those from 1993 to the present are posted with summaries. To the extent possible, these summaries will also cross-reference related opinions, for example, where a later opinion supersedes a previous one.
Many of the agency’s records are currently catalogued on a proprietary records management application that has many features that we are not taking full advantage of right now. Identifying what the application can do to improve access to this wealth of information, much of it precedential, and implementing those processes is also on this summer’s to-do list.
During the campaign season, what involvement does the Office of State Ethics have in the state’s elections and what is the purview of the State Elections Enforcement Division? If people see violations of the code, who should they contact and how?
As the campaign season heats up, the OSE will likely become very busy. Typically, an election year generates both a greater number of requests for advice and a greater number of allegations of violations of the Code of Ethics. In general, the Code of Ethics addresses elected public officials, state employees and in some instances candidates for public office using their public position or authority for personal, financial benefit. In contrast, the State Elections Enforcement Commission has oversight of the election laws and campaign finance matters. We routinely refer individuals to our sister watchdog agency and they refer individuals to us as well. Individuals with concerns or questions about the application of the Code of Ethics should contact the OSE at 860-263-2400, visit our website at www.ct.gov/ethics, or access our Citizen’s Guide to Filing a Complaint.
