iStock illustration

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...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMia2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm5hdGlvbmFsZ...