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within the County of Hawai‘i have been subject to disciplinary accusations, investigations, and punishments for violating the Code of Ethics without the County ever having sought an informal advisory opinion from the Board of Ethics. Each of these actions by the County of Hawai‘i directly violates the Hawai‘i County Charter. The Board of Ethics serves a purpose. The Board is an independent body with no vested interest in the outcome of any case. The creation of an independent Board of Ethics was by design. Having the independent body oversee the Code of Ethics helps ensure a fair and transparent process. The County of Hawai‘i, on the other hand, does have a vested interest in cases in which they are the accuser of an ethical violation, or when they clear themselves of ethics violations, such as this case. When the County is being the accuser in an ethics case, it is unjust for them to also be the judge and jury. This allows for the system to be manipulated. For example, office politics, where a supervisor may not like another employee. Another example would be a bias. When a director of a department issues an ethics accusation and then hands over the investigation to someone working under their authority, it is reasonable to say this creates a situation where the subordinate employee may feel it is their job to prove their supervisor’s accusation in order to avoid embarrassing their supervisor, rather than ascertain the facts. Both of these two examples illustrate why the Hawai‘i County Charter created an independent Board of Ethics. Even though the Hawai‘i County Charter created a Board of Ethics for this exact reason, with determining ethical violations for County officials as its very first duty, County officials have arbitrarily and without legal standing decided that they alone can accuse, investigate, prosecute, and judge ethical violations. When asked directly in writing, Director of Finance, Nancy Crawford, stated in writing that the Department of Finance does not need to go through the Board of Ethics to determine ethical violations. And I have a copy of that. When asked directly, Corp Counsel Renee Schoen retorted verbally, do you really think the County needs to check with the Board on ethical violations? Now that was verbally, so I don’t have a transcript of that. That was to a union representative ________. All this brings us to where we are today. I have submitted three possible ethical violations of employees within the Department of Finance. Some of these employees have simply done the job that they were assigned. These employees were not advised by the department that they may possibly be in violation of the Code of Ethics just by doing their assigned jobs. The Department of Finance could have assigned another appraiser for the individual properties in question, but chose not to of their own accord. The Department of Finance could have petitioned the Board of Ethics for an informal advisory opinion, but chose not to of their own accord. Why didn’t they? The answer is simple. The Department of Finance does not recognize that the Board of Ethics was created for this exact situation. The Department of Finance does not recognize the authority of the Board of Ethics. This is evidenced by the fact that Real Property did not seek any guidance from the Board on these ethical matters, where a prudent person would agree that, at the very least, there exists a distinct possibility that having someone appraise their own personal property could be, quote, a direct action—that’s a quote from the Code of Ethics—where an appraiser has a, quote, substantial financial interest, unquote, but that owning a business which represents people against the same department a County employee works for could be a