This second edition of Contracting for Services in State and Local Government Agencies provides state-of-the-art tools for best practice in the procurement of services at state and local levels, from initial stages through to completion. Including lively case studies and research conducted with state and local agencies across the United States, this book provides management advice and tips on compliance to reduce costs, select the best-qualified contractors, manage contractors’ performance, and prevent corruption and waste. Utilizing the results of new research in all fifty states, author William Sims Curry offers updated best-practice documents, methodologies, and templates including: a Request for Proposal (RFP), a scorecard for proposals to select the best-qualified contractor, a toolkit for meeting socioeconomic contracting goals without compromising price, quality, or on-time delivery, and a Model Services Contract (MSC). Special consideration is given to obtaining services and products in states of emergency. Several additional resources for practitioners are available online, including sample contracts and a straightforward, inexpensive tool for tracking contractors’ progress and cost management. The roadmap and templates contained in this book and available online to readers will prove essential to state and local government agency contracting professionals and other officials and employees called upon to participate in the drafting of solicitations, writing sole source justifications, writing scopes of work, serving on advance contract planning and source selection teams, recommending award of contracts, or assisting in the management of those contracts.

The Standards of Conduct Office of the Department of Defense General Counsel's Office has assembled an "encyclopedia" of cases of ethical failure for use as a training tool. These are real examples of Federal employees who have intentionally or unwittingly violated standards of conduct. Some cases are humorous, some sad, and all are real. Some will anger you as a Federal employee and some will anger you as an American taxpayer. Note the multiple jail and probation sentences, fines, employment terminations and other sanctions that were taken as a result of these ethical failures. Violations of many ethical standards involve criminal statutes. This updated (end of 2009) edition is organized by type of violations, including conflicts of interest, misuse of Government equipment, violations of post-employment restrictions, and travel.

Winner of the Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing the Literature of Liberty As you walk down the street, a tiny microchip implanted in your tennis shoe tracks your every move; chips woven into your clothing transmit the value of your outfit to nearby retailers; and a thief scans the chips hidden inside your money to decide if you’re worth robbing. This isn’t science fiction; in a few short years, it could be a fact of life. Spychips takes readers into the frightening world of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). While manufacturers and the government want you to believe that they would never misuse the technology, the future looks like an Orwellian nightmare when you consider the possibilities of surveillance and tracking these chips embody. Combining in-depth research with firsthand reporting, Spychips reveals how RFID technology, if left unchecked, could soon destroy our privacy, radically alter the economy, and open the floodgates for civil liberty abuses.