Is the fox guarding the hen house?: Conflicts of interest that pervade the one hundred-year history of the Oklahoma Insurance Commission

Abstract

Although the Oklahoma Insurance Department Commissioner Kim Holland has recently created two new reforms to deal with misconduct in the wake of former Commissioner Carroll Fisher's conviction, these reforms still fall short. These two policy changes focus on "things of values" and moonlighting, while well meaning, ignore several types of historical conflicts of interest-self dealing, influence peddling, post-employment, and campaign finance-that historically pervade this state-wide office. Through a reconstruction of a timeline from the Daily Oklahoman archives and a more recent examination of data from the Oklahoma Ethics Commission and the National Institute on Money in State Politics' Follow the Money (2008), a larger picture is drawn detailing conflicts of interest unacknowledged by the current Department's reforms. With the spotlight on past conflicts of interest, it may be possible to foster a new understanding of needed policy reforms to deal with many potential conflicts of interest, keeping the current office holder from "conviction" in the public square if history unfortunately repeats itself yet again. However, some conflicts of interest are structural and need Constitutional changes to fix.