Ethics and Accountability in the Philippine Public Service: Role of Citizens, Public Officials, Private Sector and Civil Society

Political corruption is a major problem in the US today. It involves almost all levels of government and affects people from all walks of life. Public office is a noble post and citizens put their trust in government officials to carry out their constitutional duties for the benefit of the citizenry. The problem comes in where both elected and unelected officials perform their duties with the goal of personal gain in full view of the law. The ethical and moral wrongs of corruption are unjustifiable in any context.

The roll of ethics in public administration is based on the administration; administrators should be value-free when they implement public policy. I will discuss why ethics should be based on the administration and, why it should not be based on each individual worker in the administration. I will discuss Weber’s stance on values in bureaucratic organizations, what Macintyre suggests, and what Hummel and Goodsell would conclude about values in public administration. Most people do not understand what an administration deals with everyday on an individual basis. They might think that an administration is supposed to make the best ethical choices, but that is not the case. People who are outside the administration might think that administrators are supposed to use everyday values when implementing policy, but that is also not the case.

There are many important elements of organizational behavior in a criminal justice or security agency. These elements of organizational behavior are guidelines to organization hire valuable employees with values, morals, and ethnics. Commitment to ethical behavior one of the elements among others that will be discuss in this paper. Commitment to ethical behavior is when unethical behavior and illegal business practice in an organization is publicized. This is element that is use in the criminal justice and security agencies because the public and businesses trust the agencies to perform their duties with professionalism, morality, and diligence. The public sees through the media about police officer who have been caught breaking the law

Corpuz, Onofre. (1986). “Is There a Philippine Public Administration?”. Reprinted from Philippine Journal of Public Administration 30 (4) (October 1986): 368-382.

Corruption is something very common in the world today. This corruption has seriously affected the economy and resulted in misappropriation of public resources. Many place policies have not changed the situations because of lack of commitment by government in enforcing the set policies. Corruption is defined as the abuse of power for personal gain. People who are in the politics become corrupt because of greed; they want the public resources to satisfy their own needs. This term is very broad, and people perceive it differently, and thus politicians and civil society have a different definition of the term. Although there are some practices that have been defined to constitute corrupt practices, still corruption is extraordinarily broad and

Often times, in the public administration field, ethics are forgotten and tend to stay out of the picture when discussing policies. Policies are often made by step-by-step processes and provide little ways to be adaptable and are not flexible. In Ethics in the Public Service: The Moral Mind at Work (1999), Garofalo and Geuras seek to bring ethics back to the table and provide new and improved ways to include ethics into the public administration field (p. 1). They specifically focus on philosophical theories that may be applied to public administration, while also analyzing and critiquing them. Philosophy is a major focus they emphasized in all 5 of the chapters in the book.

External controls: The typical American response to the discovery of breaches of ethical conduct is to adopt new legislation, make new rules, or issue new regulations. And perhaps the second common recourse is to rearrange the organizational structure or create new organizations to establish more careful monitoring. It’s an attempt to impose on the conduct of individual public servants constraints that originate from outside themselves. Internal controls: Still, we sometimes, although less often, witness a different response to ethics scandals: an attempt to cultivate and strengthen the professional values and standards of people in public service through training and professional socialization. Internal control refers to procedures or practices

It is one thing to establish a code of ethical conduct for an organization in the public sector, but it is quite another to really impress upon all employees the importance of living up to that code of conduct. What makes a code of conduct and how can management be assured that all employees understand the code and follow it's values and guidelines? How do not-for-profit professions stack up against for-profit professionals when it comes to ethics? This paper delves into codes of conduct in the public and sector and provides a review of several scholarly articles that present specific instances where codes of conduct are part of the workplace culture.

Ethics is an important characteristic to have in today’s society; many people lack ethics or lack the understanding of what ethics is. It can play a valuable role in your everyday lives and activities. Ethics is a culture where people can distinguish right from wrong and make knowledgeable decisions based on the fact and not a personal belief. Public administration ethics is described as the representative’s administrator’s duty to the public to make considerate decisions based on the information that is provided for the public that he/she represents. These decisions should be made based on what the public that they represent views as correct. Ethics is usually what is right in the eye of the beholder or the one making the decision. A well known ethical theorist, Terry L. Cooper has suggested, the public administration literature over the past three decades generally has reported on administrative ethics using one of at least five theoretical approaches: (1) ethics as virtue; (2) ethics as regime values, constitutional theory, and founding thought; (3) ethics as citizenship; (4) ethics as social equity; or (5) ethics as the public interest, (Martinez, 2009).

Assessing this issue and understanding its importance from a Public Administration perspective is quite essential. This is because Public Administration heavily correlates with ethics and perspects following all protocols of ethics. Essentially, the private sector also gives importance to ethics but there is a major difference; the private sector is deprived of the public servant ideology and heavily focuses on making profits rather than serving the public. They do not really have much of an agenda on ethics and focusing on a public cause. Furthermore, all sectors whether government, non-profit or for-profit sector, all focus on moving up the scale and all of them do include bureaucracy where there are hierarchal decisions are made which essentially are deemed as biased. Moving up the scale is not necessarily getting a promotion, or having a high position, rather it can include new ways of making money. Often these ways are

Corruption has always been one of the major problems of the world especially in politics. It has caused political fights, undermines democracy and good governance by flouting or even subverting formal processes for each other or just put in every penny in their pocket from their own countrymen without them even knowing it. In order to stop these incidents the people should be more educated in the world of politics so that they can be aware and stop the spread of corruption in the government.

Thompson asserts that, “Administrative ethics involves the application of moral principles to the conduct of officials in organizations” (1985, p. 523). In order to ensure an administrator is acting morally, they must seek out the policy which best serves everyone’s interest. Thompson claims however, that in order to ensure administrative ethics we must reject both the ethic of neutrality and the ethic of structure in order for administrative ethics to be remotely possible.

Corruption is a complex political, social, and economic anomaly that negatively affects developing and developed countries. It weakens democratic institutions, holds economic development, widening the rich-poor gap and certainly leads to governmental instability. The World Bank definition of corruption states that “…the abuse of public office for private gain”.

The opportunity to evaluate original research serves as one of the many foundations to both scholarly writing and research (Grand Canyon University, 2013). Therefore, to enhance this process I will critique empirical research articles for the purpose of demonstrating the effectiveness in understanding leadership ethics. So, using the literature presented within in the works of “Predictors of Ethical Code Use and Ethical Tolerance in the Public Sector” by Neal Ashkanasy, Sarah Falkus, and Victor Callan along with “Advancing Ethics in Public

Eventhough there might be distortion in achieving government policy, which is sometime is cause by unavoidable external cause, the citizen are expecting Public Administration would be handle it in a way that would bring less impact to the society. In order to satisfy citizen’s almost idealistic expectations, Public Administration must have the sense of highest integrity. Government are entrusted with public funds and resources, and must adhere to the highest ethical standards. Honesty, integrity, propriety, and objectivity, These goals can only be achieved through a combination of individual proffesionalism, personal standards and rigorous control framework (Deloitte). These years, people are began to question government officials integrity and government are trying to promotes the importance of integrity to their officials as well as to the citizens. For example in Malaysia, the government had establish Malaysian Integrity Instituition and Enforcement Agency Integrity Commission, that would receive reports from citizens regarding the misbehaviour of government officials.