Book of the Week: Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure

26 Aug 2014

This week I read the Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure, published by the United States Department. This book was mentioned in Think Like a Freak and the Freakonomics podcast. It details the known ethical failures in the government with what happened, which law they broke and what the punishment was. It was pretty entertaining to flip through. It is nice to know that some of the government wastes are actually being caught. PaySchedule It mentions a lot of pay demotions. The pay grade is denoted by a letter and a number. The letter is the classification and the number is what level. The higher the level, the more you are paid. You can check out what the levels are at U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Things I Learned

• If you’re stopped by a police officer, do not verbally identify yourself as a federal agent. The mere declaration that you are a federal agent is enough to influence the police officer.
• A federal employee made a deal to get an honorary PhD in public administration in exchange for signing a large grant.
• Workers at VA Pharmacy got kickbacks for buying red tape at more than twice the cost.
• Installation Strategic Planning Officer at Fort Steward was found to be using his government laptop for non-government purposes: watching porn and typing up notes for his church.
• A military officer faked his own death to end an affair.
• It is very easy to have a conflict of interest, which kind of makes it difficult to work for the government. If I owned stock in all companies, I could never do government work.
• Those in power will tell subordinates to do things that are just ridiculous.