At the International Monetary Fund, there is one set of ethics guidelines for the rank-and-file staff and another for the 24 elite executive directors who oversee the powerful organization.

Over the last four years, the fund has tightened internal systems for catching ethical misconduct among its 2,400 staff members, establishing a telephone hot line for complaints like harassment; publishing details of complaints in an annual report; and empowering an ethics adviser to pursue allegations, which last year led to at least one dismissal.

But the fund’s board members remain largely above these controls. The ethics adviser, for example, is not able to investigate any of them.

The board is responsible for policing its own directors as well as the managing director. It has a five-person ethics committee, whose work is confidential. And the only way the board can discipline its members is to write a warning letter to them or to their home countries, or the group of countries that appointed them.