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4. Electronic Mail Improves Ethics Program

Electronic Mail Improves Ethics Program

With the advent of electronic mail, agencies have become better able to contact employees, on an individual basis and as a whole, to keep them up-to-date on ethics-related matters. Throughout the ethics community we have found extensive use of e-mail, in virtually every element of the ethics program.

Agencies throughout the executive branch use e-mail to remind public and confidential financial disclosure filers to file their reports timely. Ethics officials at the Army Materiel Command (AMC) use e-mail extensively to resolve questions that arise as part of the public and confidential financial disclosure review process. AMC ethics officials have found that they are better able to ask specific questions using e-mail than by leaving messages on telephone answering machines. In addition, e-mail enables filers to respond quickly and with ease. The e-mail correspondence also creates a written record, with no additional work, which can be maintained on file, if necessary.

Ethics officials at the Department of Education used e-mail to announce times and locations of annual ethics training sessions during 1997. The advantage of this type of notification is the guarantee that each covered employee individually receives the information in a timely manner. In addition, as the training season wanes, those covered employees who have not attended annual training may be sent individual reminder notices with very little effort. Other agencies have required employees to certify to completion of the initial ethics orientation or annual ethics training via e-mail messages to the ethics office.

The Federal Communications Commission distributes a monthly ethics newsletter to employees via e-mail. Several agencies keep employees up-to-date on ethics-related matters by sending periodic ethics advisories, and regularly contact field ethics officials to keep them abreast of changes in the ethics laws, regulations, and procedures.

Ethics officials in the Defense Logistics Agency's (DLA) Office of General Counsel use e-mail to coordinate and disseminate ethics advice and opinions provided by component ethics officials to employees in the field. This ensures consistency in the advice provided to employees throughout DLA.

While most of the tasks described here can be and have been successfully completed without the use of e-mail, ethics officials consistently report a tremendous improvement in efficiency, and often in effectiveness, using this technology.