whether it sends a message to the citizens of this country that it cares about these issues.

One of the most profound changes I have seen over the last ten years on the issues and ethics question goes to the fact that in the past, wrongdoing, self-dealing, was done secretly. It was hidden and the reason is because there was a basic concept that these actions were wrong, that they were improper and that if you got caught doing them publicly, there would be a price to pay.

Today we see blatant activities, perhaps the largest, greatest symbol of it is Mr. Deaver posing on the cover of Time Magazine as a symbol of influence peddling in Washington, but it reflects a larger attitude, an "anything goes" attitude, the kind of attitude that not only does not protect the public from wrongdoing, but almost invites it, sends a message that people can do what they want because no one is going to hold them accountable.

Few things in our view are more discouraging and demoralizing to honest government policies, which is the great bulk of government employees in our society, and to American taxpayers, than the spectacle of public officials cashing in on their positions of public trust without being held to account. No one can reasonably question the importance of a strong government agency to help preserve government ethics.

This is not the role the Office of Government Ethics is playing today. This office was created to provide overall direction on Executive Branch ethics policies.

Among the most important goals of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which established OGE, was the creation of a central agency that would enforce, that would ensure enforcement of ethics violations. The Act explicitly authorizes the Director of OGE to order corrective action for agencies and employees.

As part of OGE's enforcement functions, the Senate Government Affairs Committee in its 1983 report on reauthorizing OGE emphasized the importance of OGE issuing public reports concerning its findings in cases involving highly visible public firms.

A necessary responsibility of OGE, therefore, is to inquire into, review, and analyze allegations of wrongdoings, particularly when they are related to high-level officials.

These responsibilities constitute important functions of an effective agency. Where allegations are made against high-level officials, they are all the more important.

The notion of the need for a strong agency at the time the Act was created is a very basic and simple one and it reflects the history of these kinds of issues.

Absent enforcement, absent the appearance of enforcement, absent a sense that people care and are going to hold people accountable, you are setting the stage for laws and rules to be violated, even the best of laws and rules.

Even with the problems we have with our Internal Revenue system today and peoples' noncompliance, the fact of the matter is the great bulk of people in our society comply with tax laws. They do it voluntarily, the whole system is based on voluntary compli

ance.

Most of them do it, I believe, because of the commitment to this country and to being honest and straightforward, but there is also

a sense and a recognition that there is a price to pay for not complying with those rules, with tax laws.

I don't believe anyone in this city today has a sense that there is any price to pay for not complying with ethics rules except for perhaps having the media do the job of making these things public and sticking with them long enough so that there has to be a political decision made that this is too much of a problem for the problem to continue.

But in terms of the sense of creating a climate of voluntary compliance, which is what enforcement is about in our society, there is no climate whatsoever today, and we believe that the Office of Government Ethics is responsible for creating that climate under this law, and is responsible through its actions for the fact that the climate has not been created.

Under the structure established in the Ethics in Government Act, designated agency ethics officials known as DAEO's have firstline responsibility for taking action to remedy violations of ethics standards.

Because DAEO's are frequently general counsels or staff within general counsel's office, they are often subordinate to the political appointees whose conduct among others they are meant to oversee.

In many cases, they are not subordinate, but when you are dealing with high-level officials, they are and it is that kind of complex situation that in part OGE was intended to deal with and that it is particularly important for OGE to pay attention to because it is very hard from a practical matter for the first-line agency officials to carry out the function of holding the highest officials in our government accountable for ethics activities.

If we look at the words of Mr. Martin, the present head of OGE, they spell out certain kinds of activities that would make sense, at least his belief that they should be carried out.

For example, in an interview in U.S. News and World Report in April 1986, he said,

Anytime a charge of conflict of interest or misconduct is brought to our attention or we find out about it, we investigate.

At his confirmation hearings in 1983, Mr. Martin said,

Where there is any question of an official's status, in terms of his compliance with the Ethics in Government Act, the OGE should issue a public statement.

Those two statements, I think, are very important. They go to a key part of what Mr. Martin has defined as the responsibilities of OGE and the question of whether those responsibilities are being carried out.

We have attempted through a study that is included in our testimony to try to measure to what extent these activities are occurring and I want to review it with you in brief.

In advance, however, I would like to make the point that there are basic limitations on what we or any other outside group or representative of the media or anyone else who is interested in this can find out.

Bottom line, I think the question facing this committee and OGE goes to establishing precisely what their record has been in dealing with these matters.

In the areas where the exercises of responsibility by Mr. Martin and OGE is most easily assessed, the duty to issue public statements resolving allegations of wrongdoing and the duty to order corrective action, the agency apparently has failed fundamentally to meet its responsibilities.

According to OGE staff, OGE has not been issuing orders for corrective action in recent years. In addition, to our knowledge, Mr. Martin has rarely issued public statements evaluating the conduct that has been the basis for many allegations of wrongdoing.

OGE's fulfillment of the duty to inquire into allegations of wrongdoing is more difficult for us to assess. In order to examine whether OGE does look into allegations of wrongdoing as Mr. Martin asserted it would do in his statements and whether it shares any findings and conclusions with the relevant agency and how they are followed up, we undertook a study of OGE's involvement as reflected in OGE documents in the he case of 23 high-level officials in the Reagan Administration about whom allegations of wrongdoing had received much publicity in the press.

We believe that a review of the way in which OGE became involved or failed to become involved in the cases of those senior officials is revealing of the degree to which OGE fulfills its responsibilities in the ethics arena and attempts to ensure the applications of ethics standards to even the most prominent and powerful officials. Let me add one other point about OGE's responsibilities. If OGE, in fact, is doing a proper job and a credible job and one that holds up in terms of public scrutiny, then it has another role to fulfill in this process, and that is to deal with situations where there are public allegations and where an investigation of the matter would demonstrate that there is no problem, that the public official involved, in fact, has not been guilty of wrongdoing or violation.

That is a very important role of OGE and of other bodies of that kind because it is the way that the air can be cleared for a public official.

The 23 individuals in our review included 22 who were the subject of a Freedom of Information Act request we made to OGE for all documents that discuss, address or refer to the issue of whether each of the 22 named officials engaged in ethically improper or illegal conduct as well as another individual, Robert Roland, who we had already gathered information on.

We explained our request was intended to help Common Cause undertake a study of how the government addresses allegations of ethical misconduct by government officials.

Basically we were trying to see what the agency does in each particular case when it is faced with a situation that involves serious allegations and high-level officials.

Mr. Martin's response to our request did not do very much to illuminate OGE's role in the cases of these individuals because they provided a small group of documents explicitly referring to only 9 of the 23 officials.

Many of the documents weren't written by OGE staff, but by individuals outside OGE, those at other agencies or lawyers representing the firms.

Mr. Martin, who signed OGE's letter of response, explained that other documents had been withheld. He stated that among the rea

sons the documents were not provided is that they were self-critical and self-evaluative and resulted in self-critical evaluation.

In our appeal, we argue that there is no exemption under the Act for self-critical information and this is precisely the kind of information that would help facilitate government accountability.

We cited a case finding that the purpose of FOIA is to allow the public to find for itself whether the action is appropriate.

In a letter to us, the Office of Personnel Management upheld Mr. Martin's decision to withhold documents in response to our FOIA request as to all documents then withheld originating at OGE, numbering about 70.

That letter, however, did give us a basis for breaking down who the documents referred to, and we did that and it allowed us at least to say something about the level of OGE's involvement in these well-publicized cases.

We were able to break down not precisely what they did, but at least to agree who they did something to or about in this process. There were seven prominent officials who are the subject of publicity about wrongdoing about whom OGE had no documents. That was based on the analysis we were able to do from a combination of documents given to us and a statement of what documents they had or did not have and all of this could and is subject to being able to be further clarified if one had full access to the documents.

Review of these documents also reviews that OGE mailed out correspondence relating to only 11 of the 23 officials, that is sent out to someone else correspondence.

Of these, there are only seven cases in which OGE wrote or may have written to the responsible agencies offering its advice or conclusions about the allegations surrounding these government officials.

If we add to the 7 all those about whom OGE staff may have memorialized its oral advice or consultations in writing, those about whom OGE had internal memoranda, we have a total of 11 of the 23 about whom OGE gave or may have given advice or conclusions that were written or memorialized in writing based again on the analysis we were able to do.

In addition, the agency apparently only possessed documents originating in the agencies in which the officials in question worked in 10 of the 23 cases. Thus even though OGE has oversight responsibility for the ethics programs in the Executive Branch and the 23 officials were senior in the Executive Branch about whom serious questions had been raised, OGE apparently received documentation from the field in less than half the cases.

OGE provided us with little information about its role in review of the 23 government officials about whom we requested documents. Nevertheless, from the few documents provided and a list of those withheld, a revealing portrait emerges of OGE's apparent lack of basic involvement in important ethics cases.

We urge this subcommittee to expand upon the review of OGE permitted to us by determining precisely how OGE has responded when public allegations are made about high-level officials. Špecifically, we urge you to follow up our review by determining on a case-by-case basis the extent to which OGE inquires into allega

tions of conduct, advises the agency about such conduct, and orders corrective action when necessary.

We believe that such a follow-up, such a review, is essential to determining precisely what OGE's practices are in questions dealing with ethical misconduct that has been made by public firms. In fact, we believe it is absolutely essential at this stage-given the questions, the ethics questions that are on the table for the public in terms of government officials, given the questions that are on the table with respect to OGE and its activities, it is essential to get a real basic case-by-case and factual understanding of what their procedures are for dealing with problems.

That is the key to determining what steps have to be taken in the future to solve what appears to be a very basic problem in terms of the way this agency operates.

I mentioned earlier that, since the agency has a responsibility to provide guidance on ethics standards, it goes without saying that it has a responsibility not to provide confusing or incorrect interpretations of applicable rules. Yet, since Mr. Martin became OGE Director, this office has failed to meet that standard.

The most notorious example of the office and Mr. Martin's undermining of existing ethics standards occurred during the confirmation process for Attorney General Edwin Meese, when Mr. Martin radically undermined Executive Order 11222, and the appearance standard-that is to say, the standard that says appearances of conflict are just as much a problem, just as much a violation as conflict itself.

In December 1984, we had done a study finding that Mr. Meese had violated this Executive Order with actions that might create the appearance of losing complete independence or impartiality of action. Based on Mr. Martin's testimony at his confirmation hearing in 1983, one would have expected Mr. Martin to affirm the seriousness of any such infraction.

He said: "Executive Order 11222 is the cornerstone of the standards of conduct for all Federal employees. It goes beyond the criminal laws and is an excellent guideline for Federal employees in conducting their affairs. In my view, it should share equal status and importance with the conflict of interest laws and the Ethics in Government Act."

When the issue arose in the context of Mr. Meese's confirmation hearings, however, Mr. Martin redefined the appearance standard, which is a central part of this Executive Order, and the implementing regulations. He characterized compliance with this provision in the Executive Order as "aspirational," and relabeled violations as simply "problems.

According to Mr. Martin, the appearance of losing impartiality may be characterized as an "appearance problem," and only rises to the level of a violation if, after looking "behind the appearance,' the government can demonstrate "any substance to the appearance." Mr. Martin, thus, would have established a totally new standard for determining appearance violations, a showing of actual improper influence of decision-making.

Mr. Martin's view that one may look behind the mixing of personal financial interest and public duties to see whether there was