What We Owe One Another

There is a particular loneliness in needing help from an institution whose account of itself does not match your experience. Imagine being told that assistance is available while every number you call leads somewhere else. A report describes people successfully served. You are still waiting. Eventually, you begin to wonder whether the system can see you at all.

That experience alone proves no corruption. It might reflect inadequate funding, exhausted employees, confused responsibilities, or a badly designed program. But it establishes why the truth matters. Between the promise and the person, something has failed. A decent society should want to know what.

This is the human starting point for our work monitoring government and nonprofits. Public money represents an obligation to people who may never enter the room where decisions about their lives are made. When that money is diverted, when results are invented, or when access depends on belonging to the right circle, the injury extends beyond the balance sheet. Someone has been told, through the conduct of an institution, that their life matters less than another person’s connections.

We cannot accept that as the ordinary price of doing business.

The distinction between private life and public responsibility begins with a difference in whom we owe an explanation. In private life, affection properly makes us partial. We care for our children, help our friends, and choose whom to welcome into our homes. Those attachments give human life much of its meaning.

Public authority carries a wider obligation. A person administering a public contract, a license, or a social program must be able to justify a decision to people outside that circle of affection. Friendship cannot supply the evidence that a service was delivered. Gratitude cannot establish that a contractor earned a payment. Familiarity cannot settle whose need deserves attention.

The stranger has a claim, too.

A nonprofit may be privately organized while accepting responsibilities that reach far beyond its boardroom. Federal rules for 501(c)(3) organizations explicitly prohibit operation for private interests and the diversion of net earnings to insiders.¹ The ethical point is broader: an institution entrusted with a public purpose cannot treat that purpose as the personal property of its leadership. Its workers deserve fair pay. Its services require administration. Neither salary nor overhead is, by itself, evidence of wrongdoing. The question is whether resources serve the mission honestly and on defensible terms.

This is also a question about knowledge. Epistemology asks how we know what we claim to know. In public life, that becomes an immediate practical question: what makes an institution’s account worthy of belief?

“I know him” is information about a relationship. It is not verification of an invoice.

“We have always trusted them” describes a history of confidence. It does not establish what happened this year.

A public explanation must be capable of examination by someone who was never invited to lunch. That person should be able to follow the evidence, question the reasoning, and discover what remains uncertain. Otherwise, the public is being asked to finance decisions it is not permitted meaningfully to understand.

Consider a hypothetical organization. A director excuses a friend’s incomplete documentation because the work seems urgent. Later, the friend receives an extension that another provider would have been denied. A board member hesitates to ask questions because the director once helped keep the organization afloat. A junior employee notices that the reported results are difficult to reconcile with the records, but learns that raising the discrepancy would threaten an important relationship.

None of these circumstances automatically establishes a crime. Together, however, they show how the boundary can move. The relevant question gradually changes from “Can we justify this?” to “Can we keep this among ourselves?”

Researchers Blake Ashforth and Vikas Anand describe a model of corruption becoming embedded through three reinforcing processes: questionable conduct becomes routine, participants develop explanations that make it acceptable, and newcomers learn to participate. Their analysis helps explain how a corrupt practice can outlive the people who introduced it.² In four experimental studies, David Welsh and colleagues also found support for gradual ethical deterioration through moral disengagement. Small transgressions can prepare the ground for larger ones; that progression is a risk, not an inevitable fate.³

The familiar excuses are easy to imagine. The paperwork can wait. The funder does not understand the realities. We have done too much good to let one problem damage the organization.

There may be real frustration behind each statement. Rules can be clumsy. Funding can be inadequate. Necessary work can be obstructed by bureaucracy. That is precisely why the boundary requires care: a valid criticism of a rule can become permission to conceal whatever one finds inconvenient.

Eventually, protecting the institution’s reputation can displace protecting its purpose.

At that point, the private club has acquired something more valuable than access to money. It has acquired influence over what counts as the truth. Insiders are presumed credible because they are insiders. An employee’s concern becomes a loyalty problem. A recipient’s complaint is discounted because the person is angry, distressed, or unfamiliar with professional language.

An institution must be able to distinguish the quality of evidence from the social standing of the person presenting it. A distressed person can be mistaken; a polished executive can be mistaken. Neither composure nor desperation settles the facts. When credibility depends on membership, errors become harder to correct and deliberate deception becomes easier to protect.

Rhode Island has documented reasons to take this danger seriously.

In 2017, former House Finance Chairman Raymond Gallison was sentenced to 51 months in federal prison. Among his admissions was causing a false tax filing for Alternative Education Programming, a publicly funded nonprofit. The filing reported approximately $77,957 in educational assistance for 47 students. In reality, about $3,137 assisted two students, while approximately $64,575 went to Gallison and another person in wages and consulting fees for work not performed.⁴

That case makes the distance between an institutional account and actual service painfully concrete. The students existed in the report as evidence of success. The reported assistance did not exist as described.

In a separate case, former House Speaker Gordon Fox was sentenced in 2015 after admitting offenses that included accepting a $52,000 bribe to help secure a Providence liquor license. That was the conversion of public decision-making authority into private benefit.⁵

These historical cases establish serious misconduct. They do not measure the amount of corruption in Rhode Island today, and they do not justify treating every agency or nonprofit as guilty. They do demonstrate why status, familiarity, and a worthy mission cannot substitute for verification. We do not need to prove that Rhode Island is uniquely corrupt to insist that its public institutions be accountable.

Yet an honest account must also enter the lives of people caught inside a compromised organization.

Imagine a caseworker who notices inflated numbers but depends on the job for rent and health insurance. Imagine a small provider whose survival depends on a funder it cannot safely contradict. Imagine a resident who suspects mistreatment but fears losing the only available bed. These are illustrative situations, not allegations against a particular organization. They expose the inadequacy of simply telling everyone to be brave.

There is a difference between the person designing a scheme, the person knowingly enriching themselves, and the person trying to survive under someone else’s authority. Responsibility remains, but power, knowledge, benefit, and freedom of choice matter.

Research by Anna Persson, Bo Rothstein, and Jan Teorell, based on interviews in Kenya and Uganda, argues that entrenched corruption can become a collective-action problem: reform cannot simply assume that trustworthy overseers are already in place. That work is not a diagnosis of Rhode Island. It offers a useful warning about systems in which people doubt that acting honestly will be supported or reciprocated.⁶

Our practical conclusion should be to make honesty survivable.

The OECD’s public-integrity guidance emphasizes safe reporting channels, responsive leadership, and protection against retaliation. Fear of punishment can silence people who otherwise would raise concerns.⁷ A reporting form accomplishes little if everyone believes that using it will end a career.

For a worker, survival may mean access to an independent reviewer and meaningful protection from retaliation. For a service recipient, it may mean being able to complain without risking essential assistance. For an organization, it may mean a credible opportunity to correct errors before concealment becomes its habitual defense.

Compassion must also remain clear-eyed. Some people deliberately exploit these conditions. They can benefit when others are frightened, dependent, or ashamed of earlier compromises. Once a group has participated in concealing one problem, exposing the next may threaten everyone. More concealment becomes necessary to protect the previous concealment. The circle grows tighter while its conduct becomes harder to defend.

That accelerating need for protection can consume an institution. More energy goes into maintaining the story; less goes into fulfilling the mission.

The deepest damage is then social and spiritual as well as financial. People begin to feel foolish for having believed in public service. An honest employee learns to distrust their own conscience. A person seeking help begins to suspect that dignity is something distributed through personal favor.

By spiritual, I mean the part of human life concerned with conscience, meaning, and our obligations to one another, whether or not we express those obligations through religion. A society damages that part of itself when it teaches people that integrity is impractical and that belonging requires silence.

There is grief in discovering that an institution built to express care has become a place where people must bargain away pieces of themselves.

That is why accountability must be both firm and humane. It must identify deliberate wrongdoing, recover what can be recovered, and support appropriate consequences. It must also distinguish theft from error, concealment from confusion, and predatory leadership from employees working under pressure. An institution that admits and repairs a mistake should not learn that candor is more dangerous than denial.

Repair must protect the people who depend on the service. Removing a corrupt provider without arranging continuity can punish the very people accountability is supposed to defend. Essential assistance must continue while responsibility is established and leadership, contracts, or controls are changed.

The bitter pill is real. Relationships may fracture. Respected people may have to answer uncomfortable questions. An organization may have to abandon an account of itself that has become central to its identity. But postponing those questions can transfer the cost to people with far less power to bear it.

This is the purpose guiding our work on Guardian, HOPE401, and Civic401: to make the distance between public promises and lived reality more visible, more understandable, and more open to correction.

The work begins with ordinary questions. What was promised? What was funded? What was delivered? Which records support the answer? Where do the records disagree, and what would resolve the disagreement?

Technology can help organize those questions and the evidence around them. It cannot confer guilt. A repeated payment may be a duplicate, an installment, or a correction. A discrepancy may reveal fraud, weak administration, or an innocent difference in reporting periods. A responsible monitoring system must preserve those distinctions.

There is evidence that monitoring can matter. In Benjamin Olken’s randomized study of more than 600 Indonesian village road projects, increasing the probability of government audits from 4 percent to 100 percent reduced estimated missing expenditures by about eight percentage points. The measure compared reported costs with independent engineering estimates. Expanded community participation had little average effect in that setting.⁸ The lesson for our work is to connect public visibility with competent investigation and institutions able to act. Publishing information is only part of accountability.

Our own methods must be open to scrutiny. We must preserve sources, explain uncertainty, invite responses, and correct findings when the evidence changes. We must examine our own conflicts of interest. A system that scrutinizes everyone except its friends would reproduce the failure it was built to address.

The privacy boundary matters just as much. Monitoring the stewardship of public money does not require exposing the intimate lives of people receiving help. Public funding does not erase legitimate confidentiality. We should seek evidence that a service occurred while protecting medical details, personal crises, and identities that need not be disclosed.

Power should become easier to examine. Vulnerability should not become easier to exploit.

Nor should success be measured by the number of accusations produced. Better measures would include problems corrected, money protected, reliable services sustained, complaints fairly resolved, and honest workers able to speak without sacrificing their futures. Monitoring should also make good work visible. Institutions that serve people faithfully deserve evidence that distinguishes their performance from empty claims.

Ultimately, this work asks whether we still believe that a public promise creates a real obligation.

We should be able to tell the person waiting for help that their experience matters enough to investigate. We should be able to tell the conscientious employee that there is somewhere safe to bring the truth. We should be able to tell an honest public servant that scrutiny can protect their work from those who misuse the same authority.

That requires more than suspicion. It requires patience, evidence, courage, and the humility to discover that we were wrong. Anger may bring us to the work. Care must help us remain worthy of it.

The public belongs to people who know the right names and people who know no one. It belongs to the articulate and the exhausted, the well connected and the person standing outside the door.

Our obligation is to keep that door from becoming the entrance to a private club.

Sources and research notes

Researched October 15, 2026. The Rhode Island examples are historical cases documented by the U.S. Department of Justice, not estimates of current statewide prevalence. The unnamed scenarios are explicitly hypothetical. The essay's ethical argument and proposed standards for our work are the author's synthesis; international findings are identified with their original settings and are not presented as direct evidence about Rhode Island. References to Guardian, HOPE401, and Civic401 describe the purpose and standards of the work, not a technical certification of current product capabilities.

1. Internal Revenue Service, “Inurement/private benefit: Charitable organizations”. Official guidance on the prohibition against private benefit and inurement for section 501(c)(3) organizations. ↩

2. Blake E. Ashforth and Vikas Anand (2003), “The Normalization of Corruption in Organizations”, Research in Organizational Behavior, 25, 1–52. DOI: 10.1016/S0191-3085(03)25001-2. A conceptual model, not a prevalence estimate. ↩

3. David T. Welsh, Lisa D. Ordóñez, Deirdre G. Snyder, and Michael S. Christian (2015), “The Slippery Slope: How Small Ethical Transgressions Pave the Way for Larger Future Transgressions”, Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(1), 114–127. DOI: 10.1037/a0036950. Four multiround experimental studies; not a study of Rhode Island institutions. ↩

4. U.S. Department of Justice, District of Rhode Island (June 16, 2017), “Former RI Finance Chairman Raymond Gallison Sentenced”. The cited educational-assistance figures concern July 1, 2012–June 30, 2013. The sentence covered multiple offenses; it is not attributed solely to the nonprofit conduct. ↩

5. U.S. Department of Justice, District of Rhode Island (June 11, 2015), “Former House Speaker Gordon Fox Sentenced to 3 Years in Federal Prison”. The licensing bribe occurred in 2008. This example concerns misuse of public authority; the bribe is not represented as money stolen from a taxpayer-funded program. ↩

6. Anna Persson, Bo Rothstein, and Jan Teorell (2013), “Why Anticorruption Reform Fails: Systemic Corruption as a Collective Action Problem”, Governance, 26(3), 449–471. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0491.2012.01604.x. Argument grounded in interviews in Kenya and Uganda. ↩

7. OECD (2020), OECD Public Integrity Handbook, chapter 9, “Openness”. Policy guidance on organizational openness, reporting channels, and protection against retaliation. ↩

8. Benjamin A. Olken (2007), “Monitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia”, Journal of Political Economy, 115(2), 200–249. Author-hosted paper. DOI: 10.1086/517935. Missing expenditures are an estimated discrepancy measure, not a count of criminal convictions. Results do not establish how effective Guardian or any proposed Rhode Island monitoring program will be. ↩