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Data from the recent Common Cause report indicate that most ethics officials provide written materials explaining these prohibitions to their departing employees and that many agencies conduct exit interviews to ensure that departing officials understand what they can and cannot do in their post-government employment.

Although DAEOS identified post-employment conflicts as an important ethics problem, our study also revealed that monitoring of compliance with post-employment restrictions tends to be limited or non-existent in many agencies.

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ethics

Although we believe that the post-employment bars help deal with the revolving door problem, we do not really know how well they are working. This is largely due to limited monitoring of compliance with these restrictions and therefore limited enforcement. Part of the problem is lack of information officials do not know where former employees go to work when they leave the government or whether they are in contact with their former agency. The other part of the problem is time, resources, and commitment to enforcing compliance with the prohibitions. Some ethics officials attempt to monitor formal appearances by former employees before their agencies, but these systems are not air-tight, since they rely on the former employee registering with the agency each time he or she returns. Informal contacts are sometimes flagged by current government employees, who notify their ethics officials when they get a call or visit from a former colleague.

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Recommendations.

First, Common Cause believes that OGE

should develop a model for agencies to use in monitoring these post-employment restrictions. The model should include a formal process for notifying and educating those leaving the government of these restrictions, a process for enforcing and monitoring the restrictions on appearing before the agency, and a procedure for enforcing the one-year ban, including circulating periodically within the agency a list of all former employees covered by the one-year ban.

Second, those senior employees covered by the one-year ban should be required to disclose with whom they are going to work when leaving government. This list could also be circulated at

the agency and could substantially facilitate enforcement of this important restriction.

Third, Congress should ask the General Accounting Office to conduct a follow-up study of its 1978 report, "What Rules Should Apply to Post-Federal Employment and How Should They be Enforced?" (August 28, 1978). This study could serve as a guide for this Committee and the Congress for further steps that should be taken in this area.

Revolving Door Problems in Procurement and Contracting

In recent months we have seen increasing documentation of a disturbing and serious revolving door problem concerning those involved in contracting and procurement. The problem is not only what people do after they leave government, but what they do while in government in expectation of future employment.

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Section 208 of Chapter 18 prohibits government employees

from negotiating for future employment with private enterprises that have a financial interest in matters in which the employees are officially participating, and Executive Order 11222 contains prohibitions on activities that appear to pose a conflict of However, we agree with the growing concern that more needs to be done to prevent government employees involved in contracting and procurement from giving or appearing to give preferential treatment to a potential future employer.

interest.

As Dr. Gordon Adams, Director of the Defense Budget Project, recently stated in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Defense Acquisition, "[t]he Department of Defense should not be a personnel agency for its contractors:

its job is to provide for our national security." Yet in 1983 over 2,100 people left DOD for jobs with defense contractors or moved from jobs with contractors to DoD employment. And while this problem is clearly most severe in the defense arena, which gives 80 percent of all government contracts, there is no reason to believe that it is limited to DoD alone.

The result of this situation is threefold. First, the morale of public employees is dampened when they see their former colleagues take on jobs with the very contractors whose work they oversaw or whose products they purchased while they worked in

government.

Second, public confidence in the integrity of the public procurement process is threatened. Third, many knowledgeable observers in and out of government see a connection between

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outrageous overpricing by Pentagon contractors and the revolving

door.

Common Cause applauds the attention now being focused on legislative solutions to this critical problem. We believe that further legislation is needed in this area to remove the potential for procurement personnel to treat contractors favorably in order to secure employment with that contractor in the future. We believe this problem should be dealt with during the 99th Congress.

Mr. Chairman, I would again like to thank this Committee for conducting this important oversight hearing. The issues that are being examined are crucial and the stakes are enormous. The basic question is whether the fundamental standards of conduct for public officials that have been in effect for decades are to continue to be correctly applied or simply abandoned. The outcome will determine whether public service continues to be treated as a public trust.

We stand ready to work with this Committee in any way that we can to help ensure that the current ethics laws and regulations are correctly applied and vigorously enforced.

Senator COHEN. The final witnesses today include a panel of witnesses from the Defense Department and the GAO. Testifying on behalf of the GAO is Rosslyn Kleeman, Associate Director, General Government Division.

The Department of Defense is represented by Alvin Tucker, Deputy Assistant Inspector for Auditing, accompanied by David Cooke, of the Office of the Secretary General of Defense.

Before you begin, I would like to just make an observation. Many times we find the executive branch coming before Congress and saying, "Boy, these guys really don't live in the real world, and they pass these sanctimonious laws but don't understand what the full implication is for those of us who have to go out and hire people. Aren't they setting themselves up as some sort of moral paragons of virtue up here behind this dais?"

That really isn't the case. I think the difference is that we have to go out and run for public office. If you are concerned about examination, let me tell you, it is a wonderful experience to go out and get examined by your opponents, by your political adversaries, and by the press. That is the difference. We have to go through this. We are held accountable on a daily basis, and people who work for the executive branch aren't. They are never seen for the most part. They work in many of these buildings here, and no one knows much about them.

So that is why the standards are imposed, because those in the executive branch certainly have a coequal share of power, perhaps much more so in the executive decisionmaking process than we do as legislators.

So what we are trying to do is to say that we are ensuring the public, who never gets a chance to see all those folks at work before the public, that certain standards are being adhered to.

I sometimes feel uncomfortable. We are looking down like a group of judges, totally untainted by reality, as to what you have to deal with, but we are up there and we have to be accountable to people, unlike most members of the executive branch. With that, we will start with Ms. Kleeman.

TESTIMONY OF ROSSLYN S. KLEEMAN, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, GENERAL GOVERNMENT DIVISION, GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE, ACCOMPANIED BY L. NYE STEVENS, GROUP DIRECTOR, GENERAL GOVERNMENT DIVISION; AND ALVIN TUCKER, DEPUTY ASSISTANT INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR AUDITING, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, ACCOMPANIED BY DAVID O. COOKE, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR ADMINISTRATION

Ms. KLEEMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Senator Levin. We are pleased to be here today to discuss, as you asked, a statutory interpretation that invalidates financial disclosure requirements as they affect a large portion of the Federal Government's work force. In August 1983, we became aware of certain Department of Justice legal opinions that severely affected the enforcement of financial reporting requirements in several agencies. In essence, these opinions indicated that agency financial disclosure systems could not be validly applied to the majority of the executive branch work