ABSTRACT
The concepts of truthfulness and lying pose a number of significant concerns for administrators and other public officials. The complexity of problems revolving around these concepts has heightened in the wake of demands for greater transparency in government and increasingly stringent reporting and accountability requirements. Traditional principles of representative democracy endorse transparency in government, holding that when public officials are less than fully truthful, they damage a polity's capacity for informed public scrutiny and defy the requirement that public officials be accountable to the sovereign democratic public. However, the dilemmas faced by public officials in a highly competitive pluralist or conflictive international environment oftentimes render the ethics of truthfulness and lying elusive.
