Code of Federal Regulations Title 5. Administrative Personnel § 5.2634.802 Requirements

(a) Ethics agreement defined. The term ethics agreement will include, for the purposes of this subpart, any oral or written promise by a reporting individual to undertake specific actions in order to alleviate an actual or apparent conflict of interest, such as:

(b) Time limit. The ethics agreement will specify that the individual must complete the action which he or she has agreed to undertake within a period not to exceed three months from the date of the agreement (or of Senate confirmation, if applicable). Exceptions to the three-month deadline can be made in cases of unusual hardship, as determined by the Office of Government Ethics, for those ethics agreements which are submitted to it (see § 2634.803), or by the designated agency ethics official for all other ethics agreements.

Example:  An official of the ABC Aircraft Company is nominated to a Department of Defense position requiring the advice and consent of the Senate. As a condition of assuming the position, the individual has agreed to divest himself of his ABC Aircraft stock which he recently acquired while he was an officer with the company. However, the Securities and Exchange Commission prohibits officers of public corporations from deriving a profit from the sale of stock in the corporation in which they hold office within six months of acquiring the stock, and directs that any such profit must be returned to the issuing corporation or its stock holders. Since meeting the usual three-month time limit specified in this subpart for satisfying an ethics agreement might entail losing any profit that could be realized on the sale of this stock, the nominee requests that the limit be extended beyond the six-month period imposed by the Commission. Written approval must be obtained from the Office of Government Ethics to extend the three-month period.