Prairie State Wire

Ethics reform must be on the next legislative session’s agenda, according to state Sen. Heather Steans, but there could be delays.

“There's been a lot of challenges in ethics over the past decades here in Illinois,” said Steans (D-7th District) during a webinar hosted by Truth in Accounting, a government accountability group. “It's always a challenge when we talk about doing ethics reform in Springfield. It's complicated and hard to actually make real progress.”

The Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society’s Executive Director, Gretchen Winter, tends to agree.

Gretchen Winter, executive director, Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society | Submitted

“This is an important issue for the state of Illinois and probably other states as well,” Winter told Prairie State Wire. “I gathered from the webinar that there are a sufficient number of people committed to getting this done this legislative session. Ethics and ethical behavior have been an issue in this state for quite some time.”

Stean’s comments come on the heels of the U.S. Attorney's Office alleging that Commonwealth Edison (ComED) utility company engaged in bribery. 

As previously reported, ComEd agreed to pay a $200 million fine after a federal investigation exposed payments of more than $1.3 million to associates of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, named in a U.S. Attorney's office document as "Public Official A."

“I think the Senate President is committed to ethics,” Steans said. “He’s been working with a group of legislators and putting things together on this but we haven't seen a draft yet.”

Below are some issues identified by Steans during the webinar likely to be included in an ethics reform proposal.

Stop the legislator-lobbyist revolving door by establishing at least a one-year prohibition on legislators leaving office to work as lobbyists.  

“There are some revolving door prohibitions already in place with the executive branch in Illinois, but we don't have any for the legislators and more than half the states in the country do have a revolving door ban of some sort,” Steans said.

Better define who is a lobbyist to ensure consultants and lawyers are not able to use loopholes to skirt registering and serving as lobbyists.

“We should better define who a lobbyist is,” Steans added. “One of the loopholes of clients in the Commonwealth Edison case is that people serve as consultants or attorneys and don't have to register as a lobbyist but they are, in a lot of ways, doing similar work as a lobbyist.”

The proposal, according to Steans, would clarify and make more transparent exactly who is doing lobbying roles.

“I was a corporate ethics and compliance officer before I joined the university,” Winter, a professor with Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, said. “In corporate settings, conflicts of interest are one of the most frequently raised issues.” 

Expand disclosure of legislator’s outside income.

“Right now legislators have to do some disclosure of their income but it's very high level and doesn’t give you a whole lot of information,” Steans said. “You don't know the extent of what they're really getting from what source. We think there should be some expansion of that so we can understand what potential conflicts of interest there are.”

So far, Steans said, the reform has passed in the Senate but has not been approved by the House.

“Disclosure of source of income is one way to get some transparency and insight into what might be problematic so that you then can have a constructive discussion about how to address it,” Winter said.

Making the legislative inspector general (IG) into an independent agency and enable the IG to self-initiate investigations. 

“We need to at least enable them to self-initiate investigations of any type and it needs to be an independent agency for both hiring and budgeting," Steans said. "Right now, it's part of the Legislature, which means they have to go through the board leaders to get their budgets passed. That’s providing oversight to yourselves There are not a lot of checks and balances going on currently."

Winter added that the degree of independence proposed for the IG role is empowering.

“What’s good about it is an independence that enables an efficient and immediate response to issues that might otherwise sort of disappear, not be raised or investigated,” she said.