The newly formed Rutgers Center for Government Compliance and Ethics will serve to advance the application of effective ethics and compliance program principles in government agencies through research, education, and networking.
“The purpose is to create cultures of integrity at all levels of government, which drive mission fulfillment and inspire public trust,” says Rayman L. Solomon, dean of the Rutgers School of Law–Camden and faculty sponsor of the center. “Enabling people to recognize and respect legal and ethical boundaries is partly about developing awareness and skills, but also involves creating the right infrastructure and processes.”
Solomon argues that existing controls and resources are insufficient to assure that ethical behavior and compliance with the law are integrated into the mission of government agencies. Effective compliance and ethics programs can improve overall ethical behavior by detecting and preventing problems as part of an ongoing process.
“We’re going to start a research project where we’ll examine which governmental agencies have compliance programs,” Solomon says. “We’ll have a conference to discuss compliance and to bring the issues to light, and what we want to do is help agencies at every level implement compliance plans.”
The new Rutgers center grew out of the establishment of the Jay A. Sigler Fund for Corporate Compliance, which was established in 2008 by Rutgers–Camden alumnus Joe Murphy to help business, governmental, and non-profit organizations better understand the complexities of compliance and ethics.
Murphy, who has worked in organizational compliance and ethics for more than 30 years, named the fund for Sigler, a professor emeritus of public policy and administration at Rutgers–Camden.
A Haddonfield resident, Murphy says organizations can only build internal controls if compliance is encouraged.
“Governments can commit the same types of violations companies do,” he explains. “We’re starting to see government organizations take a beginning step of adopting codes of conduct, but it’s going unremarked. We’re going to show them what they should be doing.”
The Honorable Ruben Castillo of Chicago, who has served as a federal district judge for the Northern District of Illinois since 1994, praised Rutgers–Camden for its effort to establish the Center. He is completing two terms of service on the United States Sentencing Commission.
“It’s gratifying to see that the principles of the organizational sentencing guidelines continue to provide a framework for incorporating ethics and compliance into the workplace culture of all organizations, including government agencies” Castillo says.
He continues, “We must all recognize that government agencies are not immune from compliance issues and that rules themselves are not sufficient. The sentencing commission itself was well-served by the knowledge garnered by the private sector’s efforts to implement the organizational guidelines when it promulgated a more specific and rigorous guideline for ethics and compliance programs in 2004 that tried to promote the development of an internal ethical culture. I commend Rutgers for establishing a center devoted to using this knowledge and expertise to encourage research and training in this vital area, and to assist government agencies in building a strong ethical culture as part of the mission of public service.”
To advance the Center’s mission, Murphy formed an advisory board comprised of seven experts on compliance and ethics. The board prepared a White Paper describing why government agencies should be proactive in ethics and compliance.
“Those charged with the responsibility to govern should themselves commit to establish the proactive management processes and procedures that can help assure that government acts ethically and within the same laws that govern the governed,” the paper states. “Well-established practices and principles of compliance and ethics from the private sector would significantly support this endeavor.”
Together with Solomon and Murphy, the members of the Rutgers Center for Government Compliance and Ethics Advisory Board reflect an impressive breadth of experience, accomplishments and thought leadership across the field of organizational compliance and ethics, including from the academic, private industry, and governmental sectors. Biographies for Advisory Board members Donna C. Boehme, Paula Desio, Emil Moschella, Mark Rowe, and John Steer can be viewed at rcgce.camlaw.rutgers.edu.
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Media Contact: Ed Moorhouse
(856) 225-6759
E-mail: ejmoor@camden.rutgers.edu