The Ethics of Hiring Former Government Employees.

• Author: Beezley, Aron C.

There's a common quip in Washington that federal employees leaving their jobs to work in the private sector are "going to the Dark Side." However, what is not so funny for federal contractors and former executive branch employees is when the application process for--or the performance of work at--the new job runs afoul of ethics laws and regulations.

For example, Oracle America Inc.'s 2019 bid protest of the Defense Department's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud procurement involved several allegations of personal conflicts of interest by agency employees who sought employment with Amazon while working on the solicitation. The U.S. Court of Federal Claims determined that the agency had appropriately investigated the potential conflicts and concluded that they did not adversely affect the procurement but not before the entire issue became the subject of intense public and national political scrutiny.

In October, the mayor of Washington, D.C. fired a senior official for accepting a job with a contractor doing business with the city. According to the mayor's office, the employee failed to recuse himself from matters involving a subsidiary of the company hiring him. The subsidiary recently won work under a $1.6 billion city Medicaid contract. The mayor has asked for an investigation. Like the Air Force example, the awarded contract is potentially at risk.

When considering how to comply with the rules, the analysis looks at two phases: before and after. The first phase deals with the employee's job search. The second deals with the type of work that the newly hired employee may perform and when.

The search phase is guided by the general principle that public service is a public trust, requiring federal employees to act impartially when performing their official duties. Hence, executive branch employees thinking about private sector employment must recuse themselves from participating personally and substantially in any matter that would affect the financial interests of a person or company with whom the employee is considering employment.

The employee must notify, as appropriate, supervisors, coworkers and agency ethics officials of the job search and request recusal, preferably in writing. Failure to do so can potentially result in criminal and civil penalties for the employee. In addition, contractors can lose contracts on which former federal employees worked if there is found to be a conflict involving their hiring.

When a former...