Government ethics office reorganizing site to make policies easier to digest

The Office of Government Ethics, an agency that counsels federal employees on potential conflicts of interest, plans to renovate its website to make audits and other guidance easier for employees -- and transparency watchdogs -- to find, officials said.

USOGE.gov was established as a resource for executive branch personnel. But the office's leaders say the site is too packed with pages and columns of documents to demystify the rules of professional conduct.

"It's like you give somebody so much information that they can't digest it in anymore. It's like a smorgasbord," said Joseph Gangloff, a deputy director at the office who oversees a division that conducts on-site reviews of agency ethics programs. About two years ago, the agency gradually began improving the layout and interactivity of its website and now is calculating the cost of hiring a contractor to revamp the infrastructure.

OGE's mission is to ensure executive branch decision-making is not influenced by the personal interests of employees involved in the decisions. It pursues this goal by educating personnel, issuing regulations and reviewing agencies' compliance with ethics requirements. For example, this year the agency reviewed potential misconduct at the Interior Department, where staff allegedly accepted gifts from oil and gas production companies.

As part of the website makeover, the office expects to publicly post the reviews online, instead of releasing them only to individuals who file Freedom of Information Act requests. Open government groups this month began questioning why the documents were not on the Internet. The audits typically are distributed only to agency heads and the designated agency ethics official, a departmental employee tasked with managing an agency's ethics program.

Gangloff said contrary to recent reports that the agency used to publish the documents online and then stopped in recent years, reviews never were routinely posted. He added OGE did not take any material offline, either.

Unlike the Office of Special Counsel or an agency's inspector general, the ethics office does not investigate wrongdoing but rather works to prevent it. Its website contains guidance and do's and don'ts for employees to follow when working with the private sector. For example, employees who serve as trustees of organizations cannot engage in government activities that influence the companies' stock prices, unless the securities the government employee holds are worth less than $15,000.

OGE publishes online DAEOgrams, which are memoranda for ethics officials that explain how to interpret and comply with new regulations, financial disclosure policies and restrictions on outside employment. A recent DAEOgram clarified an ethics pledge for Obama administration political appointees, which bars them from lobbying executive branch officials for the rest of the president's term after they leave the government.

With a staff of about 80 people trying to serve roughly 300,000 employees required to file confidential financial disclosure reports, OGE has never had the time or resources to organize the increasing amount of information it dispenses online, Gangloff said. Only recently did the office spend less than $20,000 to set up a studio for producing online training videos. "We used to have no internal capability to produce anything of a high-level quality," he said.

The new plan is to post ethics reviews as soon as they are finalized.

OGE picks offices for review each year primarily based on the amount of time that has passed since an agency's last review. "What we're doing is spot-checking," Gangloff said. Congressional scrutiny, media coverage, citizen concerns and even an agency's concerns about its own practices also could factor into selections.

Agencies reviewed during the past two years include the National Transportation Safety Board, U.S. Postal Service, U.S. Army Materiel Command, Defense Commissary Agency, Naval Hospital Pensacola, Health and Human Services Department's ethics division, Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service, and Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board.

The office is evaluating 15 Cabinet-level ethics programs that it intends to publish online by the end of 2010. The purpose of this analysis is to share with other department heads and DAEOs the programs' practices, both good and bad, as points of comparison for charting improvements to their programs, according to OGE officials.

"Wouldn't you like to be able to click on the word 'DAEO' and it tells you what it is and what the regulations are?" Gangloff said. "We're not at the point where we have avatars telling you to go into each room . . . but we're trying to get to state of the art."