Conflicts of interest may riddle a federal agency tasked with providing unbiased scientific findings because its leadership has gutted financial disclosure requirements for its employees.
More than 90 percent of officials at the U.S. Geological Survey aren’t required to file financial disclosure forms or undergo ethics training, the Department of Interior inspector general found.
Interior’s top ethics official circulated an agency-wide memo in November 2013 urging staff to find available loopholes that would allow them to file fewer disclosures.
Melinda Loftin, the agency’s chief ethics officer, had independently “determined that more employees than necessary were filing confidential financial disclosure reports,” the inspector general said.
While the Survey’s 8,298 employees are prohibited from holding financial interests in mineral wealth, oil, gas and mining companies that work on public lands, just 802 of them documented whether they had such interests in 2013.
The inspector general said gaps in reporting potential conflicts of interest allowed an agency scientist to steer a research grant to the university where her husband worked in 2014.
A Survey regional director had waived disclosure requirements for the unnamed scientist in 2008 “although she continued to be substantially involved in issuing this cooperative agreement. Had she filed financial disclosure reports during this time, she would have been required to disclose her husband’s position with the university, alerting officials to a possible conflict of interest,” the inspector general said.
Nancy Baumgartner, the Interior bureau’s deputy ethics counselor, delegated the responsibility for deciding who should have to divulge their financial holdings to regional directors who, in some cases, handed that authority down to their assistants.
Because so many different individuals determined which employees had to submit financial disclosures, the Survey faced a patchwork of confidential disclosure criteria across its programs.
Only the staff who actually file financial disclosure forms are required to undergo ethics training, “potentially leaving 90 percent of USGS employees unaware of federal and USGS ethics requirements beyond the new-hire orientation.”
The Survey’s seldom-used “ethics training” consisted of nothing more than a PowerPoint presentation sent as an email attachment to the handful of employees who filled out the forms in 2013.
Even so, some employees failed to complete the training because ethics staff delivered the PowerPoint in November with a Dec. 31 deadline. Thirty officials were unable to view the presentation before the holiday season concluded.
Agency officials attempted to manage the ethics training through a manual system of emails back and forth with employees, even though there are technologies that can track such programs automatically.
A spokesman for the U.S. Geological Survey said the bureau has received the report but has not yet formulated its response.
Go here to read the full Department of Interior inspector general report.
