Peruvian President Dina Boluarte is the latest government leader to be ensnarled in a corruption flap thanks to a penchant for high-end time pieces. Before her it was the then-Prime Minister of Croatia Ivo Sanader (here) and after him the then-Thai Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan (here).

Like them, she apparently believed wearing a different expensive watch on different occasions was part of the job of running a country. And like them, her luxurious taste was caught on camera. Photographs show her at one or another function modeling watches that in toto cost more than $500,000.

From the collection of Peruvian President Dina Boluarte. Source: Presidential Flickr account

Just as with the Sanader and Wongsuwan flaps, photos of Boluarte’s watch collection prompted uncomfortable questions: Why didn’t she report the collection on her income and asset declaration form as required by law? And how could she, like them a longtime government employee, afford such a pricey collection?

Despite Sanader and Wongsuwan’s lame explanations –“I didn’t know I had to report them.” “Oh wait, they aren’t mine, I just borrowed them.” – the exposure of their unexplainable wealth cost them nothing more than civil society reproaches. Whether Peruvian authorities will accept Boluarte’s similarly flimsy explanations remains at this writing to be seen.

Beyond the reminder that some government leaders are incurably venal, these serial watchgates offer lessons. For leaders enamored of fancy timepieces, report them on your income and asset disclosure form or keep them up your sleeve when a photographer is nearby. For anticorruption agencies, there is a less flippant, more important lesson.

In all three countries it was not the national anticorruption agency that spotted the leaders’ failure to disclose a pricey watch collection.

In Croatia, it was the press. Hearing of Sanader’s watch predilection, every time he appeared in public news photographers zoomed in on his left wrist. In Thailand, citizens started a Facebook page to count how many high-end watches Wongsuwan sported. In Peru, a reporter from the podcast La Encerrona trawled through Boluarte’s photos on her official Flickr account.

There is no reason why the Croatian, Thai, and Peruvian anticorruption agencies could not have done what citizens and the media in these three countries did. All three agencies devote substantial effort to verifying the accuracy of officials’ personal financial declarations, often with special attention paid to those of senior leaders, and Sanader, Wongsuwan, and Boluarte seem never to have missed an opportunity to flash a ritzy timepiece in public. How could agency staff have missed them?

My experience suggests two reasons. One is the understandable fear of the consequences of going after powerful leaders. Sanader was quite popular, and the anticorruption agency was just getting its feet on the ground. Wongsuwan was part of a military government which had recently overthrown a democratic government and was showing little patience with those who questioned it.

Rote verification

The second reason agencies don’t pay attention to what watches and other assets officials own is the advice often received on verifying the accuracy of disclosures. The stress is on rote methods for checking the declarations. Anticorruption agencies are told to check if the submission is internally consistent (assets reported in line with income disclosed) or if property registered in a land or motor vehicle registry is reported on the financial disclosure. Especially as more governments are digitizing this data, these are easy, inexpensive checks to run.

But as a 2011 OECD report explains, these verification methods are of little value. Few corrupt officials are dumb enough to fail to report on their disclosure a car registered in their name in the motor vehicle registry. (One study of an East Asian country found that over seven years only two low-level officials had made this mistake.) Rather, as the OECD warns, they can be expected to “take serious care to make sure their formally registered data are coherent.”

But the OECD’s warning is often lost in the plethora of guides, policy notes, and studies pouring forth from the anticorruption community on the verification of officials’ income and asset disclosure reports. Even the OECD report pays far more attention to the various methods for conducting rote computerized checks than to checking whether the car an official actually drives, or the house where he or she lives, or the watches sported have been disclosed. The same is true of StAR’s 2017 report on income and asset declaration programs. A visual check of an official’s assets against what is reported is mentioned but not stressed.

Peru’s watchgate once again demonstrates the overriding value of watching to see what assets officials in fact own to see if they are being honest about what they report owning. Isn’t it time to tell anticorruption agencies to make this verification method front and center?