Among the planned additions to the forms is the disclosure of relatives who hold city jobs, a question intended to discourage nepotism.  Of those generally required to submit disclosure reports, most are elected officials, candidates for public office, policy makers, purchasing agents and other high-level public servants.  The new disclosure requirements are provisions in a larger bill that would create a separate and significantly shorter financial disclosure form for private citizens who serve as volunteers on some nonprofit boards that are affiliated with government bodies.  Because of changes in state law, those volunteers would begin this fall to file the same 32-page document as public officials, which some officials worried would scare off volunteers.  The Bloomberg administration says it is not trying to water down requirements for public officials, only to streamline them and strike a balance between the public’s right to honest government and the right of public servants to some privacy.  “We’re trying to strike the balance between disclosing conflicts by decision makers and carrying the drapes off their windows so anyone can peer into their homes,” a spokesman for the mayor, Stu Loeser, said.  Still, the proposed changes are causing ripples among groups that promote transparency in government and are not convinced that less is more. Several said they were concerned that the changes had not been widely discussed before becoming part of the legislation. “It seems to me whenever there’s a shrinkage of information, the public should be concerned,” said Norman Siegel, a longtime civil rights advocate who is running for public advocate next year.  Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, a watchdog group, said: “I wouldn’t want the disclosure forms changed in a way that would limit or diminish information that has been previously required. In fact, there may be good reasons to increase the disclosure requirements as opposed to loosening.”  Until this year, a state law required the city’s disclosure form to be as stringent as the state’s, which the current city form is modeled after. But the state law was amended this year to give New York City greater leeway, and the city has since been working on the changes.  One set of changes outlined in the new mayoral bill would authorize a short form intended for volunteers at certain New York nonprofits, like the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Public Library.  Directors of such groups are scheduled to start filing annual disclosure forms this fall to comply with a 2005 state law that increased oversight of public authorities, defined to include any nonprofit organization that is “affiliated with, sponsored by or created by” a municipality.  City officials said that if the legislation passes, the volunteers would fill out a form of two to four pages.  As long as they were addressing the disclosure requirements of volunteers, city officials said, they decided to make some long-sought changes in the disclosure requirements for public servants.  Members of the conflicts board say the changes make sense because they eliminate information about situations that do not amount to a conflict of interest under the city’s ethics law and because they add questions about family ties that may flush out conflicts of interest.  “We’ve been fighting for this for years,” said Mark Davies, the executive director of the board.  But information about many sources of outside income that had been routinely provided would disappear under the proposal, including gains on rental income and sales of stock. That could make it hard for the public to know that a public official made between $250,000 and $500,000 by selling stock, as, say, Betsy Gotbaum, the public advocate, did in 2006, or collected between $5,000 and $35,000 in rent from an ex-spouse, as William C. Thompson Jr., the city comptroller, did in 2007.  Gene Russianoff, a senior lawyer with the New York Public Interest Research Group, another citizens watchdog organization, said he supported the overall proposal but was troubled by the idea of not requiring public servants to report the amounts of outside income or their holdings.  Even when income and holdings are reported in ranges rather than amounts, he said, year-to-year spikes can show up. “It raises a flag,” said Mr. Russianoff who planned to testify Tuesday at a public meeting of the City Council standards committee.  Conflicts board officials said that having public servants report smaller investments was irrelevant, if not pointless, since the city’s ethics law does permit officials to make decisions involving business or financial interests worth less than $10,000.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Requirements On Disclosure Could Lessen For Officials. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
A new bill before the City Council would scale back the scope and length of the disclosure forms filed each year by 8,000 public servants.