Case study about ethical work behavior in gov

Ignorance or Insider trading?

You are a young policy analyst in your second month of work for a city’s law enforcement agency. You have received no ethics orientation, although an ethics booklet was handed to you on the first day of work. You have not read it. Your basic job is to analyze agency operations to make them more effective and efficient. To do this, it is necessary for you to read the case reports of the agency’s field agents. These reports are classified confidential or secret as the case may be. You have been granted an interim secret clearance, pending completion of a background investigation, which will take a year. As a related duty, you sit on a grant and contract review board that evaluates proposals from outside contractors for studies with the same general purpose. Over the few weeks you have sat on the board, you have become quite disappointed by the low quality of the bids. Few contractors seem to have carefully read the RFPs, and many are at best only nominally qualified to do the work.

One day, an acquaintance of yours who is affiliated with a very prestigious think tank calls and explains that the think tank is thinking about filing a proposal. Your friend says that he has several questions about what the agency is really looking for. You eagerly fill him in. “Finally,” you think, “we’ll get a good proposal, and the county will get some solid research for all the dollars they’re granting.” A few days later, you come across the ethics manual in your desk drawer, and, it being a slow day, decide to read it. You are both surprised and a little apprehensive to learn that no one but the contact person named in the RFP is to reveal any information about a Request for Proposals. Upon reflection, you realize that what you have done could be considered a form of “insider trading,” that is, providing information that could be advantageous to only a few persons.

Discussion Questions

1. What should you do?

2. Should you discuss the situation with a veteran colleague?

3. Should you tell your boss?

You decide to discuss the problem with your office-mate, a 30-year veteran government employee who has been in this agency over ten years. He advises that “if you tell Max (the division chief) you divulged confidential material, you’ll never see another confidential file.” This is very plausible. Max cut his teeth as a security investigator protecting nuclear weapons secrets at the height of the Cold War. What should you do?