Looking for Conflicts in a Growing Regulatory Landscape
Welcome to the August 2022 edition of our newsletter! In this issue, we’ll examine conflicts of interest that may exist for a public official, and how you can better understand what such issues could mean for your clients.
What Lies Beneath? Identifying Potential Conflicts of Interest for Regulators
Government officials on all levels affect business decisions, and citizens’ lives, on a daily basis, in ways that are routine to possibly market-altering. Many of these officials consider past matters, case law and existing regulations, and act in ways that attempt to be fair to all sides. Yet administrators are also human beings, with lives and agendas of their own, that may be wholly separate from their work. What to do, however, if that separation doesn’t occur?
As part of the trust placed in allowing bureaucrats to make consequential decisions that can affect multitudes of people, many of these officials must file financial disclosures to make public the stock holdings, honoraria received and other relationships (including of their spouse) which could, in theory, influence their decision making. On the federal level, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics maintains a database of filings from top executive branch officials, including the president and Cabinet members, as well as federal judges (including administrative law judges) and foreign service officers. The deadline for these filings is May 15th of each year. Each federal agency also has an ethics officer who, in addition to overseeing the ethics policies for his agency, must file such a disclosure with the Office of Government Ethics as well. Various industry-related oversight positions also file financial disclosures, such as clinical trial investigators working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
On the state level, nearly all states require legislators to disclose information about their income outside of serving in the legislature, and those of their spouses, but there is no centralized database for researching such matters, which are often overseen by a state’s Office of State Ethics, or an equivalent agency.
Such filings can be fairly dense but extremely valuable in terms of identifying an administrator’s activities outside of government. If your clients are going to face regulatory scrutiny, one aspect to consider as preparation is to better understand what public records exist about an administrator’s possible conflicts of interest, so you can understand how it might affect your client’s situation.