Conflict of interest rules must extend to government contractors, says ethics expert
The American Bar Association’s House of Delegates
recently adopted a resolution recommending that the federal government
expand its protections against conflicts of interest among government
contractors. The resolution was based in part on a report Kathleen
Clark, JD, ethics expert and professor of law at Washington University in
St. Louis, wrote for the Administrative Conference of the United States
(ACUS).“In recent decades, the federal government has greatly
expanded its use of contractors to perform services, and spends hundreds
of billions on services every year,” Clark writes. “While an extensive array of ethics statutes and rules regulate government employees to ensure that they make decisions in the interest of the government rather than a private interest, only a few of these restrictions apply to contractor personnel.”