About ERC

Letter from ERC President Patricia J. Harned, Ph.D.

Hello and welcome to the Ethics Resource Center’s online home.

We hope you find the site user-friendly and the content useful and informative.

ERC has been in the organizational ethics business for a long time – 88 years and counting – and there are resources available at ethics.org that you would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.  This site is visited thousands of times a month by policymakers, chief ethics and compliance officers from business and government, students, scholars, nonprofit professionals and every-day readers from around the world.  We think that proves that ethics is a dynamic field, and that ERC is often an important source of guidance for our visitors.

First and foremost, ERC is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, dedicated to independent research that advances high ethical standards and practices in public and private institutions.   With the global recession of the past year, we also are focusing more closely now on ethics and compliance aspects of the federal government’s response.  The American economy’s dislocation has been so severe, and the government’s strategy so massive and sweeping, that we are witnessing ethics issues never seen before here in the nation’s capital.  We will be keeping a close watch on developments.