Wednesday, February 27, 2008

2007 National Government Ethics Survey released by the Ethics Resource Center

On January 29th, the Ethics Resource Center released the National Government Ethics Survey (NGES). 774 federal, state and local government employees were interviewed by telephone for NGES from June 25- August 15, 2007. From its press release:

" Slightly less than one-third (30%) of federal workers surveyed believe their organizations have well-implemented ethics and compliance programs, which ERC has found greatly reduce the incidence of misconduct. Only one in 10 said there is, indeed, a strong ethical culture in their federal workplace. But the results were considerably less impressive at the state level (where only 14% saw strong ethics programs and a mere 7% perceive a truly ethical culture) and in local government (where the figures were 14% and 9%, respectively).

Almost two thirds of local government employees (63%) said they observed at least one type of misconduct in the previous year. At the state level, the rate of reported misconduct was 57%, while 52% of federal workers had witnessed ethics breeches. In the aggregate, 57% of public servants surveyed had observed misconduct in the past year. There has been no improvement since ERC's last survey of government employees in 2005, and the rate is worse than that of the biennial survey in 2003.

Local government had the highest level of workers who witnessed misconduct but did not report it – 34%. That compares with 29% at the state level and 25% within federal agencies. "

This free downloadable report requires registration with ERC. Also, related webcasts, articles and other information is available at http://www.ethics.org/.

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