The South Dakota Board of Regents meets today and tomorrow at the School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. Among the agenda items is second reading of an amendment to the Regents’ conflict of interest policy. The Regents want to clarify for their employees the tepid Benda-Bollen law passed by the Legislature last year in response to the wild self-dealing of former nominally Regental employee Joop Bollen.
The Regents propose to strike this language from their policy manual:
Outside businesses in which faculty members, administrators and extension agents who serve the Board full-time in professional capacities have direct or indirect financial interests may be subject to the prohibitions contained in the South Dakota Codified Laws when bidding on contracts offered by Board institutions or other state agencies.
…and replace it with this stricter, more detailed explanation:
Persons employed by the Board of Regents are subject to the prohibitions imposed upon
state employees in the South Dakota Codified Laws, to include SDCL 5-18A-17 to 5-
18A-17.6. In general, these statutes prohibit state employees from deriving a direct
benefit from certain state contracts, while employed or for a period of one year thereafter.
- The prohibition applies to contracts, other than employment contracts, with any state agency, and it applies whenever an employee:
- Approves, awards, or administers;
- Recommends for approval or award; or
- Supervises a person who approves, awards, or administers the contract.
- A state employee derives a direct benefit from a contract when the employee, the employee’s spouse, or other persons with whom the state officer or employee lives and commingles assets:
- Has more than a five percent ownership or other interest in an entity that is a party to the contract;
- Derives income, compensation, or commission directly from the contract or from the entity that is a party to the contract;
- Acquires property under the contract; or
- Serves on the board of directors of a for-profit entity that derives income or commission directly from the contract or acquires property under the contract.
A state employee does not derive a direct benefit from a contract based solely on the value associated with the officer’s or employee’s investments or holdings, or the investments or holdings of other persons with whom the state employee lives and
commingles assets.- An authorization may be granted in accordance with SDCL 5-18A-17.2, to allow employees to derive a direct benefit from a contract described in section 1.E.1, by the:
- Institutional chief executive officer or their designee for authorizations for employees of the institution;
- Executive Director and CEO for authorizations for Board staff and the chief executive officers of the institutions; or
- President of the Board for authorizations for the Executive Director and CEO.
Every authorization granted pursuant to SDCL 5-18A-17.2 is a public record and must be filed with the commissioner of the Bureau of Human Resources.
This revised policy makes clear that any Board of Regents personnel involved in running a program that issues contracts, like say, the GEAR UP grant for American Indian education, cannot issue contracts to themselves or their subordinates to do evaluations or other GEAR UP work. But remember, given the porosity of the Benda-Bollen law, those Regental personnel actually can cash in on such contracts, if their supervisor writes a note saying it’s o.k.
Wait!! Convenient regents finallly looking at conflicts aaaaaand is brown county proper venue? Otherwise perp walk joop van him to pierre in cuffs at 3am unannounced. Let him sit in jail over the weekend until bond hearing monday afternoon. Just like every other sorry felon. Most of state thinks benda was murdered so dangerous?? Flight risk? We’ll c.
away from a smart phone, let me be clear.
Jay Williams should emphasize scandals in the state at the hands of republicans wearing pinkie rings (jackley, not joop grudzt). Paula too:)
the flip side is that dems have raised min wage, would institute ACA for all, and would economically develop state for the middle class benefit, not for the rich and greedy regents, and republican politicians and croneys.
Voters have to know they can get to the ballot box unrestricted and know every vote counts, as in the past.
Regents are to the state as 7 alderwo/men and mayor are to rapid city economic development in breaking the law to benefit the wealthy republicans. Tifs for the busiest intersection in rapid city, perhaps the state give welfare to developers and monopolists, while Adelstein’s Allender hypocritically asking chhurchs ect to house the needy.
Yes Les, BHP’s new castle is 3-4 stories contrary to your statement. Perhaps you’ll apologize for these tifs too.
Blight, my…well, u kno…!
Ms. leslie, I don’t see where your friend Mr. Les said anything about the construction near the hill which is now gone out on Catron, but I am sure he is sorry about the TIF districts for which you seem distressed. I, too, am distressed about those TIFs. And how the traffic by the breakfast joint out there has increased.
as kai rysdall, NPR’S daily apologist for the 1% (on Market Place APM) scrambled to assure yesterday that just because u quietly parked your offshore business address in a BVI, Grand Cayman or other tax haven, despite the developing “Panama Papers” story, that there are valid, legal reasons for doing so. whew!
OTHER places seemed to be, for one, republican SD which seeks parking inherited wealth on Sx Falls and Dakota Dunes street addresses (as Regents, NSU and developers quietly explore advantages of being a National Center of International Financial Security, or some such scheme);
local/regional powerhouse BHE or whatever or where-ever they are calling it, is building a 4 story glass hilltop castle with TIF funds enabling the poor economically challenged monopoly to add something like 50-150 employee cubicles someday, thereby blocking the viewshed-for-50-miles because they can;
and get this, they are doing taxpayers, who will give them a significant tax shelter (via mayor and rapid city council), A BIG FAVOR BY DEVELOPING that heavily travelled eyesore of BLIGHTED LAND at the newly created interstate intersection of catron and highway 16 gateway to Mt. Rushmore.
grudz , les yer pal loves the whole economic development scheme (again) BHE is bringing, I guess because he says he thinks its hardly 3-4 stories and is run by an Emory (which is a very good thing imo, too). he, like you, apparently can’t see too well, which I am truly sorry for. my time is coming if I am that lucky:) his post was a few weeks ago somewhere here.
the whole “blighted” thing comes from uber rich/powerful/ best lawyer-in the-state butler’s (duffy’s mentor) land development of the water slide kitty-corner at the same intersection. once sold, the eathern works remaining attracted rats, homeless people and garbage so adelstein’s mayor allender came to the rescue. it had truly become an undevelopable eyesore. thanks to TIFF laws, we ARE saved. same business mitigation plan as a uranium mine, huh?
hopefully BHE won’t create a lasting legacy of another eyesore blinding motorists and flooding the place with light at night, contrary to good “DARK SKY” practices it’s architect will hopefully not be ignorant of, with the $70 million budget.
this is satire, m. bruner.
British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas don’t, of course, inform our own tax authorities or the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The London School of Economics researcher Gabriel Zucman, author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations has carefully measured discrepancies between global financial assets and liabilities – and he argues that the discrepancy is a rough proxy for the value of all the funds held in offshore tax havens.
Zucman estimates that around 8 per cent of global wealth is held offshore, roughly $7.6 trillion, equivalent to around 10 per cent of the entire value of goods and services produced each year in the global economy.
One of the mysteries of modern global economics is that it appears the poorer countries of the world are effectively lending money to richer states such as the United States and Europe. But adjust the raw figures for the hidden wealth identified by Zucman and this paradox disappears.
The hidden flows quantified by Zucman also have a serious impact on global and national wealth inequality measures. Most measures of the assets of the very wealthy by national statisticians are unreliable because the very rich don’t tend to disclose all their assets when asked to do so in confidential statistical questionnaires. The ONS has reported a largely flat trend for UK wealth inequality over the past decade – a trend which has prompted some to argue that the rich are not, in fact, getting richer.
Yet the picture is very different if one factors in off-shore wealth. The flat trend in rich countries such as the UK will, in a likelihood, turn out to be an illusion. Zucman estimates that value of offshore wealth has shot up by 25 per cent in the past five years alone. Given that it is the wealthy who predominantly use tax havens that will be the wealth of the very rich which has grown so sharply. And a proportion of those very rich will be British. The elite’s share of wealth relative to those in the middle (already very high) will almost certainly be even higher.
Zucman estimates that the share of total wealth held by the top 0.1 per cent of Americans (those with £20m in net wealth) rises from 21.5 per cent to 23.5 per cent once offshore assets are factored in. He thinks something very similar would be true for the UK and rich European countries.
Consider foregone tax revenues. Not all the money held offshore is there to avoid or evade tax. But it’s fair to assume that a very large chunk of it is. There are no obvious advantages for most people to hold assets in different countries. For those who want to minimise their tax bills or keep dirty money hidden from the authorities the advantages are large. Estimates of foregone tax are inevitably speculative, but for what it is worth Zucman thinks tax havens are responsible for around $200bn of unpaid tax to national exchequers around the world – money that is sorely missed at a time of austerity in many countries.
When it comes to debates about inequality we tend to focus on policies of fiscal redistribution and benefits. Should the top rate of income tax go back to 50p? Should tax credits be cut? These are important questions. But perhaps a more important question when it comes to addressing the gap between the super wealthy and the rest of us is: what are we doing about assets and incomes that are hidden off-shore?
Independent-panama papers today