You declare a conflict honestly and immediately find yourself unable to
act. This page explains why that is the design and not a punishment.
The moment a conflict is recorded, it blocks. Before anybody has
reviewed it, before anybody has decided whether it is serious, before
the ethics reviewer has read it.
Because the review can take a week.
The alternative is that you carry on acting on the thing you just told
us about while somebody gets round to reading it. If the conflict turns
out to matter, everything you did in that week is in question.
Blocking first is inconvenient and it is the honest order to do things
in.
A thing. An award, a supplier, a matter, a contract.
A conflict is never recorded as being about another person. It is not
"you and this colleague"; it is "you and this decision". That is both
more accurate and less unpleasant: the record says a decision needs
somebody else, not that a person is compromised.
Not you. An independent ethics reviewer, and the system compares the
person rather than the login — a second account does not make you
independent of yourself.
Clearing needs a written reason, and it never deletes anything. A
conflict that was declared and cleared stays on the record for ever,
with the name of whoever cleared it and why.
Recusal is recorded separately from the conflict, because it does
several things and an audit needs to know which of them happened:
You can, if you hold the ethics capability. It is a different act with
a different weight, and the record says who raised it. Declaring your
own needs nothing at all, deliberately: the people least likely to hold
a governance appointment should not be the ones unable to raise a
problem about themselves.
