Oklahoma’s CIO is out after ethics settlement

Joe McIntosh, who served as Oklahoma’s chief information officer the past 16 months, is no longer employed by the state, officials confirmed with StateScoop on Thursday.

Aside from confirming McIntosh’s employment status, a spokesperson with the Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services declined to answer any questions about McIntosh’s departure.

“OMES thanks Joe McIntosh for his service to Oklahoma and wishes him well on his future endeavors,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

McIntosh declined to go on the record for this story. His LinkedIn profile shows that he is now self-employed as a “Digital & Data Strategy Consultant” searching for part-time roles as an “one-demand” CIO.

McIntosh joined the state government in 2020 as a senior director of app development and data before Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed him to his Cabinet in July 2023. Before joining the state, McIntosh held technical leadership roles at the fast-food chain Sonic Drive-In and worked as a software developer for Objectstream, an Oklahoma City tech firm.

According to documents published this month by the Oklahoma Ethics Commission, McIntosh reached a settlement with the state in which he agreed to pay $2,500 for two ethics violations. A summary of the settlement shows that McIntosh self-reported the violations and that he’d incurred no previous ethics violations.

According to the agreement, McIntosh broke a rule related to impartiality, which relates to situations in which an employee “knows that a particular matter involving specific parties is likely to have a direct and predictable effect on the material financial interests of the state officer or employee or of his or her family member.”

The other rule McIntosh broke was called “misuse of office,” which prohibits public officials from endorsing products, profiting financially from their positions or using their positions to help family members profit.

As part of the settlement, McIntosh agreed to undergo ethics training, which he had already completed. The settlement also required that “corrective measures” be taken to ensure McIntosh would in the future not be involved in any contracts related to his spouse’s employer or its subsidiaries. The document does not name which company McIntosh’s spouse worked for.

All state governments have strict rules regarding how officials interact with vendors and deal with vendor contracts. Several CIOs in other states have told StateScoop they must decline or report even the smallest gifts from vendor representatives.

Brian Berkey, an associate professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told StateScoop that organizations vary widely in how their rules align with just ethics.

“Sometimes people who are adopting the rules are motivated by genuine concern that rules that are well-justified and are adopted and followed,” Berkey said. “But other times it’s more for PR or pressure that comes from the fact that other similar organizations have rules that look a certain way and a particular organization doesn’t want to look like they’re adopting laxer rules about something of ethical significance.”

Berkey, who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, said that although he didn’t know anything about McIntosh’s case, it did not sound like a case of deeper corruption.

“If it really was just an oversight, and he was going through the motions, not really thinking about it, just did this because it was something that seemed fairly routine and then later realized it was this conflict of interest and self-reported it, that kind of does seem like the sort of case where he failed to satisfy a responsibility he had in the job, but didn’t do it maliciously,” Berkey said.

Several provisions in McIntosh’s agreement indicate an arrangement in which he would continue working as the state’s top technology official. The Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services declined to confirm whether McIntosh had left his role voluntarily.

As for McIntosh’s punishment, Berkey said he was dubious about the decision to require ethics training, especially since the violations were self-reported, but that a small fine sounded like a reasonable punishment, even if only levied as a deterrent for others who might make similar mistakes.

“This is a topic that’s debated pretty extensively in philosophy, not just about fines but any form of punishment,” Berkey said. “What are the appropriate grounds not just to justify punishing in the first place, but to determine what an appropriate punishment is in various cases? It’s pretty widely agreed that deterrence is among the legitimate purposes so long as punishment is being applied fairly in response to violations of rules that people are aware of or should be aware of.”