Ethics office approves faster, easier financial disclosure

The Office of Government Ethics (OGE) is making it easier for federal senior executives to make required financial disclosure filings.

Financial disclosure for career federal employees at the Senior Executive Service level and for all political appointees must be completed using the burdensome SF-278 form. The process must be completed when employees first arrive on the job, once a year while on the job, and when they leave. Another form, the OGE-450, is for employees who work in jobs where conflicting financial interests might be an issue, such as those in contracting, auditing or investigations.

Efforts to streamline the filing process gained ground in August when OGE approved an online form currently in use by the Agriculture Department for all federal agencies.

John Surina, director of USDA's Office of Ethics, has been the motivating force behind the movement to speed the filing process. Surina brokered a deal with USDA's National Finance Center (NFC), which administers the Thrift Savings Plan and owns highly secure computer systems.

NFC developed a secure platform for USDA's online financial disclosure forms with the hopes of offering it as a service to other agencies. Now that time has come. By allowing USDA to offer the system to other agencies, OGE has widened NFC's potential customer base to approximately 300,000 federal executives.

NFC's online financial disclosure platform allows executives to create password-protected Web pages on which they can fill out disclosure forms and post transactions as they occur to keep their forms up to date. The system has fill-in-the-blank boxes for text entries and drag-down menus for selecting standardized entries. Once a form is completed, it can simply be updated, rather than filled out in full every year. A sample of the form is available at http://www.nfc.usda.gov/EPPSample/oge450/index.htm.

Surina says NFC tried to make the form as simple as possible. "We believed that a plain language version was mandatory-no need to compound the complexity of the process with either technical or regulatory babble," Surina said.

Users must still print, sign and mail the forms the old-fashioned way, but work is under way to allow digital signatures and online filing in the near future.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was the first new agency to sign up to use the system and a number of other agencies have asked to join.

Still, technology can only solve some of the roadblocks to making financial disclosure filing easier. "The costs of reporting relate not to the technology used to record and transmit the information; rather,the costs flow from the excruciating detail required by law, and that requires a legislative fix," Surina said.