Author Archives: Richard Messick

Reducing Corruption Risks in Public Works Construction: The Critical Role of Project Preparation

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Jill Wells, Senior Policy and Research Advisor, Engineers Against Poverty, contributes the following guest post:

With the creation of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Global Infrastructure Facility, as much as an additional $1 trillion a year is likely to be invested in the construction of roads, power plants and other public works in the developing world over the next decade.  While this new investment could provide a welcome boost to economic growth and poverty alleviation, it could also be a curse.  Public works construction is regularly rated the most corrupt industry in Transparency International surveys, and if even a small percentage of this money is lost to corruption, the harm could be enormous.  The development community thus needs to step up efforts to help developing nations prevent corruption in the construction of public works.

To date, most prevention efforts have focused on the award of the contract to build the facility, but that decision is only one of many that must be taken in the process of selecting, preparing, and building new infrastructure.  A new report from the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre identifies the corruption risks at the pre-tender stage and explores how additional opportunities for corruption may arise at later stages of the project cycle when the initial selection and preparation process is compromised.   Continue reading →

Outsourcing Customs Inspections: Integrity for Hire

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Last week I described Guatemala’s innovative approach to attacking grand corruption.  Rather than relying on domestic agencies, whose personnel may either be bought off or scared off a case, Guatemala has turned over responsibility for investigating massive theft by senior civilian and military leaders to an agency headed by an appointee of the U.N. Secretary General.  Accountable not to the Guatemalan government but to the United Nations, the Commission Against Impunity, at it is called, develops cases of grand corruption and then works with the Guatemalan Attorney General to see the accused individuals are prosecuted.  What the government of Guatemala has in effect done is outsource the investigation of allegations of grand corruption to a third-party. While countries where grand corruption is deeply ingrained would do well to adopt their own version of an impunity commission, the political obstacles to do so are steep – beginning with the fact that many of those likely to a target of the third-party would have to agree to its creation.

There are other, less controversial ways the outsourcing solution can be employed to tackle corruption.  One that deserves far more attention than it has received is to hire a private firm to inject a dose of integrity into the processing of imported goods.  Continue reading →

Tackling Grand Corruption: Guatemala’s Successful Experiment

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As guest blogger Mathiew Tromme wrote last week, Guatemala appears to be on the cusp of a major political transformation as a result of recent revelations of high-level corruption.   Citizens once fearful of expressing discontent with their government have taken to the streets in massive numbers both in the capital and the provinces.  The Vice President and several ministers have been forced to resign, and the continued tenure of the President is now in doubt should he not consent to major changes in the way the nation is governed.

Much of the credit for the revelations sparking this transformation goes to a small agency little known outside Guatemala, an unusual hybrid domestic-international organization accountable to the U.N. Secretary General with a mission to investigate crimes committed by politically powerful Guatemalans.  Quite possibly the most innovative experiment in governance in modern times, it has the independent investigatory power of an international tribunal, but unlike other tribunals the prosecution and trial of its cases are the responsibility of the Guatemalan judiciary.  Its success in developing cases against senior military and civilian leaders, working with prosecutors to see charges are filed, and pushing the courts to decide the cases fairly has been nothing short of remarkable.  Other nations up against ingrained grand corruption would do well to consider establishing a similar entity. Continue reading →

Two Questions for the Open Contracting Partnership

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One of today’s more promising global anticorruption movements is The Open Contracting Partnership.  A venture that brings together organizations as different as the World Bank, the Philippines Government Procurement Policy Board, and Oxfam, its goal is to open government contracting to greater transparency and public participation.  As many studies show (click here, here, and here for recent examples), corruption infects all stages of the procurement process  — from skewing the specifications to favor a single firm to rigging the tendering process to rampant cheating in contract performance.  And as many of these same studies argue, less secrecy and more public involvement in the process is one way to curb it.

The Partnership has taken important steps towards realizing these objectives since its launch in October 2012.  It has developed global principles governing contract openness, created a standard format for reporting data on government contracts, collated information on open contracting in the award of natural resource concessions and land, assembled a quality staff and advisory board, and a fostered an enthusiastic global community of practice.

All this is not only welcome but laudable, and the organizers and supporters of the Partnership are to be congratulated for the initiative.  Now that the Partnership is firmly established, however, it is time to address two questions it has so far avoided. Continue reading →

The SELDI Report on Combating Corruption in Southeast Europe: Good News/Bad News

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In an earlier post I cataloged several studies evaluating anticorruption policies in different regions or by different agencies and promised to summarize each for time-pressed readers.  Today I review a report by the Southeast Europe Leadership for Development and Integrity (SELDI), Anticorruption Reloaded: Assessment of Southest Europe, on the state of corruption in nine states:  Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Turkey.  SELDI is a coalition of 17 civil society organizations from the nine countries with one, the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia, serving as its secretariat.  The 250 page report was authored by the Center based on extensive consultations with SELDI members, assessments in each of the nine countries, and comparisons of surveys on corruption taken in 2001 and 2002 with the results of identical surveys taken in 2014.

The good news?  The report provides an exhaustive analysis of corruption trends in the nine countries, what each has done to reduce corruption, and what more needs to be done.  The focus is on critical, but often overlooked issues: corruption in the legislature and the courts, weaknesses in public financial management and how they fuel corruption.  The empirical and qualitative data are weaved together skillfully to provide a detailed picture of each country along with specific recommendations.  The really good news?  The existence of civil society organizations in these nine countries capable of producing such a high quality report.

The bad news? Continue reading →

Raising the Ethics Bar: Namibia’s President Voluntarily Discloses His Income and Assets

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Namibia is not the first country that comes to mind when looking for international trend setters.  Roughly the size of Turkey but with a population of only 2.1 million, it has been an independent state for just 25 years.  Yet thanks to a recent initiative by its newly installed President, Hage Geingob, the country could become a leader in the worldwide struggle to combat corruption.  On May 21 the President voluntarily disclosed his income and assets and those of his spouse.  The disclosure is an effort to prod Namibia’s public servants to follow his example, but if President Geingob’s precedent setting move prompts other heads of state, in Africa and elsewhere, to voluntarily disclose details of their personal finances, the country may long be remembered for its contribution to the international movement to curb corruption.

As important as the disclosure are the actions the President took in connection with it, actions other heads of state seeking to emulate him should take as well.  Continue reading →

Alert: Director General of Zambian Anti-Corruption Commission Under Pressure to Resign

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Rosewin Mutina Wandi, Director General of the Zambian Anti-Corruption Commission, is under pressure to resign. Upon returning from an overseas trip last week she was greeted by a demand from the leader of a political party that she quit. Since then others have joined in, and threats are being made to organize countrywide demonstrations to have her removed from office. All this follows the Commission’s investigation of a Presidential Aide and an alleged leak to the media of a letter she wrote to the President about that investigation.

Fortunately, the Commission is standing by her. Its Board has issued a statement condemning attempts to intimidate her and supporting the professional way she has conducted herself as Director General. The statement makes it clear that the Board considers the attacks against her to be attacks against the Board and the Commission as an institution.

It is not clear yet why the sudden effort to remove the Director General. Is it her candor in acknowledging that outside pressure can sometimes be of value in fighting corruption? Or the Commission’s effectiveness in combating corruption? Continue reading →

The Use of Social Media to Combat Corruption: The “I Paid a Bribe” Web Site in India

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The initial success of the Indian web site “I Paid a Bribe” fed hopes social media offered a way to curb petty corruption.  Launched in August 2010, the site invited citizens of Bangalore to file an online report if they were asked for a bribe, stating where the demander worked, the amount demanded, and whether they had paid or not.  The Bangalorese responded to this invitation with gusto.  One told of having to bribe a clerk 12,000 rupees, or about $200, to register a flat.  Another angrily recalled having to pay 700 rupees, around $10, to verify an address for a passport application: “When I asked him why should I pay for this, he ridiculed and threatened me that lot of details are missing and I won’t get my passport. The same happened to some of my friends.”   Within six months the site had received more than 5,000 reports of bribery and had become a media sensation, featured in stories the New York Times, the BBC, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous Indian papers.

But two years after launch, web site traffic had fallen dramatically and site sponsors had begun questioning its utility.  One told authors of a Harvard Business School case study, “Not too many people are now coming on to our site, and whatever limited activity that occurs there is linked with fresh media reports. I think there is a feeling of ennui . . . at the moment.”  Transparency International’s Dieter Zinnbauer reports traffic has declined at similar web sites in Pakistan, Columbia, and elsewhere and that some have even folded.

While disappointing, these failures are not surprising given the hurdles such sites face to achieve results. Continue reading →

Death by Corruption: The Nepal Earthquake

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Although press reports attribute the growing death toll in Nepal to the April 25 earthquake, earthquakes were in fact the proximate cause of very few fatalities.  Nepalese did not die from shaking ground but, as news footage shows, because they were crushed by falling buildings.  The link between earthquakes, collapsing buildings and fatalities has been known for centuries if not millennia as has the solution: codes setting standards that ensure all structures can withstand the shock of a quake.  Since 1994, Nepal’s building code has contained several provisions requiring buildings to be earthquake proof, but as the New Zealand consultant who helped develop the ’94 code told Bloomberg News, drafting a quakeproof code is easy, “the hard thing is to get implementation.”

That is where corruption makes its appearance.  Builders can find many ways to bribe around building codes, and judging from New York Times correspondent Chris Buckley’s May 1 story, Nepalese builders found them all.  The collapsed buildings in Katmandu “exposed not only flaky concrete and brittle pillars, but also a system of government enforcement rotted by corruption and indifference. . . . Residents and building experts say the corruption is an open secret . . . .  The developers and landlords who slap up the buildings . . . know they will rarely be punished by officials, who are often happy to look the other way for a price.”

The earthquake – corruption – death nexus is a predictable part of post-quake reporting.  Stories similar to Buckley’s appeared following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2008 one in China’s Sichuan province, the 2001 quake in the Indian state of Gujarat, and the 1999 one in the Marmara region of Turkey.  But as with the Nepal story, they were based on anecdotes and impressions.  Is corruption really why so many buildings become coffins once a quake strikes?  And if it is, what can be done to curb it? Continue reading →

Anticorruption Enforcement Policy: Insights from the Deterrence Scholarship

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Over the past three decades much empirical work has appeared on the effect of the criminal law on crime rates.  Usefully summarized in review articles by, among others, Professors Daniel Nagin of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Tonry of the University of Minnesota (click here and here for examples), this research offers several insights for those engaged in the fight against corruption.

The first is that the criminal justice system can make a difference.  Save for acts committed in the heat of the moment, crime is a cost-benefit proposition.  Would-be criminals tote up the (usually) monetary gains of violating the law against the risks of being caught and punished and, when the benefits exceed the costs, commit an offense.  Thus policies that drive up the cost of crime by increasing the chances an offender will be caught, prosecuted, and appropriately punished reduce the crime rate.  Recent studies confirm that corruption crimes are no exception.  Putting more resources into to prosecuting corruption in the United States and ensuring corruption in the construction of roads is detected both reduced corruption.

But if the good news from the deterrence literature is that the criminal law can make a difference, the bad news is that that the difference is not easy to realize and that the logic of deterrence can lead policymakers astray.  One of the more striking findings is that what would seem to be the easiest way to enhance deterrence, sharp increases in the penalties for corruption crimes, may actually lead to more corruption.  Continue reading →