COIB testimony - Ethan Carrier on confidential information restrictions

Thank you.

This is an incredibly important subject.

I mean, this is a real risk and something that needs to be addressed.

We believe that the law that already exists does address it.

First, the city charter has a remarkably robust

provision prohibiting the disclosure or the use of confidential city information by public servants.

And so I'm just going to talk about those two sections of that charter prohibition.

The first part is the prohibition against public servants disclosing

confidential city information and this is a remarkably broad prohibition it really prohibits public servants from disclosing confidential city information for any purpose regardless of whether there is any

any benefit or loss or anything else.

It doesn't matter who they're disclosing the information to.

The mere disclosure all by itself is a violation of the city charter.

So a public servant who disclosed confidential city information for the purpose of

for their own purpose or somebody else's purpose related to making money on a prediction market would certainly be encompassed by that restriction.

Again, regardless of to whom the disclosure is made.

The second part of the confidential information restriction is a prohibition against public servants using confidential information.

For their own private gain or for the private gain of associated parties.

And associated parties is a certain set of close family members and also people with whom they have a business or financial relationship.

So a business partner, a roommate, someone to whom they owe money, these are all people whose interests essentially function as their own interests under the conflicts of interest law.

They could not use confidential city information to obtain any kind of benefit, again, for themselves through a prediction market or for one of these associated family members or business or financial related parties.

To the extent that those two provisions don't cover a public servant's actions related to a prediction market, we think

that the city charter's prohibition against the use of the authority of their city office to obtain a private gain, again, for themselves or an associated party would cover the rest of it.

That is, if you used your city position to obtain the confidential information that you would use, this would be a violation of the...

Use of the prohibition against using your city position or the law as written

has uses a definition I'm saying confidential information because that's an established definition within the conflicts of interest law this law uses the term non-public information which is

maybe broader and we're a little concerned.

We don't know exactly what the scope of that might be, but if a public servant were to use information

that they obtained that was non-public but not confidential, the misuse of position restriction would likely prohibit most, if not all, of the conduct related to obtaining or using that information.

For their own private gain or the private gain of those associated parties that I've just described.

So to the extent that the confidential information restrictions don't cover it, we think the misuse of position restriction would cover it.

So again, we think this is an incredibly important

new area that needs to be thought about.

We think

the law as it exists covers this concern and we believe the board would robustly enforce this provision if a public servant were obtaining a private gain

in any way related to this or disclosing confidential information even again without a private gain for themselves or anyone else.

I'll hand it back to Carolyn to talk about the public disclosure piece of this.