Teller County Sheriff Runs Several Businesses on the Side While Serving as Elected Sheriff
“This sounds very in the shadows,” says Joan Harrington, director of social sector ethics at Santa Clara (California) University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
“Public officials and fiduciaries are held to a higher standard — not just impropriety but from the ethical standpoint, the appearance of impropriety.”
“If you had a director of a nonprofit who also had a business, with people sharing jobs [working for the director’s nonprofit and the director’s private business at the same time], without analysis of whether that was fair and reasonable, you’d have a problem,” says Harrington.
“We often think, if you disclose, that’s OK. Not true,” she adds. “They [potential conflicts] need to be disclosed, discussed and analyzed.”
Joan Harrington, director of Social Sector Ethics, quoted in Colorado Springs Independent.