Following Watergate, a scandal far worse than what we have seen thus far, Congress and the president adopted a number of major government reforms that included a new campaign finance system, ethics rules, the Office of the Independent Counsel, and much more.

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Any body that does not set up its own ethics monitoring system will come under the secretariat's Ethics Office.

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Ultimately, this phenomenon has transformed a system with already questionable ethics to one even more distasteful and corrupt, granting the political elite and the wealthiest individuals unprecedented influence over election outcomes and compromising the democratic process in ways not imagined even a generation ago.

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Ethisphere's proprietary rating system, which it calls the Ethics Quotient, is based on a series of multiple-choice questions in a survey that is designed to capture a company's performance in an objective and standardized way.

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Maybe the time has come for the Justices of the highest court in the land to voluntarily agree to participate in the same Code of Ethics which govern the rest of the federal court system.

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Based on the House of Lords report, audits are also not challenging the ethics and wisdom of government officials hiding the truth about banks and the financial system from investors and the general public.

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Beyond the specifics of the immediate case, however, the crisis involves larger Clinton vulnerabilities, including earlier allegations of sexual and financial impropriety, a variety of ethics charges against members of his Cabinet and the apparent abuses of the campaign fundraising system in his 1996 re-election effort.

CNN: By Ronald D. Elving, CQ Staff Writer

Even if Germany manages to reform its much-despised tax system after this September's election, many fear that the country's corroded tax-paying ethics will take years to recover.

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