DON’T Fabricate Your Reports

Don’t ever fabricate anything in your briefing notes or reports. Before you consider writing something that is not true, or is deliberately misleading, think about what the consequences could look like as a newspaper headline. For example, imagine a photo of yourself in the Ottawa Citizen under the headline “Bureaucrat says he had to invent account of business summit because report was due before event.” According to the Citizen, an October 2012 report to Ottawa City Council, written by the economic development director and formally submitted by the city manager, contains detailed praise for an event that hadn’t yet happened.

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