A Conceptual Model for Benchmarking Performance in Public Sector Ethics Programs: The Missing Link in Government Accountability?

Ever since Osborne and Gaebler's Reinventing Government([1]), the federal government's National Performance Review Act,([2]) the American Society for Public Administration's (ASPA's) Center for Accountability and Performance and Hartry's primer on Performance Measurement,([3]) performance, outcome measurement and accountability have been guiding principles for government at the close of the 20th Century. Government and society have changed, and performance (and tools of performance measurement) has taken center stage as citizens expect more and better government for less. But governments themselves have demanded performance in order to operate in the complex, interdependent, global and technologically-based environment facing all organizations in the 21st Century. Productivity and efficiency concerns are at the heart of the performance orientation of government but so too are accountability and ethics. The application of benchmarking to ethics programs administered by federal, state and local ethics commissions, boards or offices is the focus of this paper. Specifically, this article presents a variety of models that can be used to successfully adopt benchmarks for use in government ethics programs. As ethics transgressions or allegations of ethics violations continue in the public sector (e.g., Congressman Traficant's expulsion in 2002 and Secretary of the Army White's resignation in 2003), this paper posits that ethics benchmarks hold the key for achieving both efficiency and accountability in government in the 21st century.