Author Archives: Richard Messick

Why Context Matters: The Failure of the Ugandan Revenue Authority to Curb Corruption

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In his 2013 volume explaining why donor-supported reforms often go awry in developing states, Kennedy School Professor Matt Andrews lays the blame on the failure to appreciate how political imperatives, patronage networks, cultural practices, and other elements of local context affect the way reforms are implemented.  While Andrews offers telling examples of how ignorance of context doomed reforms in Argentina and Malawi, the failure to stamp out corruption in Uganda’s revenue collection service provides an even more vivid illustration of the way the very different context in a developing state can cause “best practice” reforms to fail.  The analysis is taken from Odd-Helge Fjeldstad’s classic account of the attempt to reform tax collection in Uganda, “Corruption in Tax Administration: Lessons from Institutional Reforms in Uganda,” chapter 17 of Susan Rose-Ackerman’s 2006 edited volume, International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption.

In 1991 revenue from taxes and customs duties in Uganda were seven percent of GDP, an astonishing low figure even on a continent where tax evasion was the norm.  Under pressure from the IMF, the World Bank, and other donors the then recently installed government of Yoweri Museveni took decisive action.  Following what was then considered best practice for boosting revenues and cutting corruption in a revenue service, the government made the revenue department of the Ministry of Finance into an autonomous agency.  Independent agency status allowed the Uganda Revenue Authority to implement a number of reforms to reduce corruption.  Salaries were raised above civil service levels and strictures on firing non-performing workers removed.  As a new agency, all employees were considered new hires and had to prove themselves during a probationary period; as a result almost 250, or 15 percent, of the old revenue department staff were weeded out.  In addition, “clean” expatriates were hired into senior management positions, and measures were taken to improve morale: offices were upgraded, working conditions improved, and training provided.  All in all, the Uganda Revenue Authority was considered a model for how to create an efficient, non-corruption revenue collection agency.

During the first years of its existence, the authority’s performance suggested these reforms were succeeding.  Revenue collection as a percentage of GDP improved and perceptions of corruption declined.  These early indicators of success, however, soon began to decline.  Forty-three percent of businesses surveyed in 1998 reported paying a bribe to a Uganda Revenue Authority employee; in March 2000 President Museveni termed the authority a “den of thieves,” and in 2003 its former head listed corruption as “problem number one” in the organization.  A Commission of Inquiry of C corruption in the Uganda Revenue Authority was appointed in 2002, and although its report was never released, leaks suggest the commission found massive corruption in the ranks. Continue reading →

National Anticorruption Strategies: A Request for Assistance

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GAB editor-in-chief Matthew Stephenson and I have been asked by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which serves as the Secretariat to UNCAC’s Conference of States Parties, to write a guide to support the development and implementation of effective and sustainable national anti-corruption strategies.  The guide will contain an outline of the key stages in the development of a national strategy, an explanation of the role different stakeholders can play in developing it, models for implementing a strategy, and a discussion the methods for monitoring and evaluating its implementation. Good practices and success stories at all stages of the process — development, implementation, monitoring and reporting — will be highlighted.

We are in the early stages of collecting information and would welcome readers help in identifying useful materials: copies of national strategies, evaluations of their effectiveness, and so forth.  We will of course build upon the fine analysis of Asian countries’ experiences with national strategies that the UNDP Bangkok office released in December, which I wrote about here.  We also have the very useful policy notes posted on the websites of U4 and TI.

To date we have identified 60 plus the countries that have or have had a national anticorruption strategy.  They are listed below.  Additions to this list would also be welcome.

Afghanistan, Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Ghana, Greece, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Pakistan, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Southern Sudan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, UK, Ukraine, Vietnam

Anything from newspaper stories to policy papers to academic analyses would be appreciated.  Thanks to Google translate, we will be happy to receive material in any language. You can post suggestions either as a comment on this post, or send your input using the contact page. Thanks in advance!

Combating Corruption in Uganda or Merely Displacing it: The World Bank’s Public Expenditure Tracking Survey

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A World Bank-initiated effort to reduce corruption in school funding in Uganda is widely, and rightly, celebrated for its results (click here and here for background).  In the early nineteen nineties on average 87 percent of the monies the Ugandan central government budgeted for textbooks and other school supplies “leaked out” somewhere between departing the Finance Ministry and arriving at the school house front door.  Yearly data revealed that 73 percent of the schools received less than five percent of the monies to which they were entitled, and only ten percent received more than half.  The 1996 Bank project had an immediate effect on the rate of losses.  By 1999 the government found schools were receiving on average 95 percent of what they were supposed to receive, and a 2002 World Bank study likewise showed a sharp drop in fund leakage.

The dramatic improvement is attributed to the enormous publicity the data on losses garnered.  Parents were outraged and the government and donor agencies embarrassed.  Within the development community, the Uganda Public Expenditure Tracking Survey, as the work to dig out and publicize the loss data became known, has been enormously influential, the story becoming a parable for how to fight corruption.  A Uganda-like PETS project is now routinely prescribed for attacking corruption in public expenditures, and a Google search on “Uganda PETS” yields over 100,000 hits and returns some 20,000 citations on Google scholar.

But for all the attention the effort has generated, there is evidence that it may not have had any impact on the level of corruption in Uganda.  It is possible that all it did was force those raking funds off the school fund program to turn elsewhere.  The Uganda PETS thus may simply have displaced the corruption in the school funding program rather than ending it. Continue reading →

The Political Will to Fight Corruption: Lessons from Nigeria

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“Political will” is often said to be the sine qua non of a successful anticorruption policy (click here, here, and here for some examples), yet the term remains, as Linn Hammergren complained almost two decades ago, one of “the slipperiest concepts in the policy lexicon.”  Derick Brinkerhoff tried to pin down what those advising on anticorruption meant by it in a 2010 U4 policy brief.  He concluded that most used the term to refer to some combination of commitment by controlling corruption by top-level political leaders together with the ability to do something about it.

While a reasonable definition, a moment’s reflection will show that advising developing countries that to fight corruption they must have political will is empty advice.  If a country’s leadership had the commitment to deal with corruption and the tools for doing so, it wouldn’t need advice on what to do, it would be in the heat of the battle.  The reason most countries remain on the sidelines is that their leaders lack the necessary commitment and capacity.  So telling developing countries that a successful anticorruption effort begins with political will assumes away the problem.

What would help is advice on how to create the commitment and ability to fight corruption.  Continue reading →

Conflict of Interest and Democratic Theory: Lessons from Bruce Cain’s Democracy More or Less

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Although written for Americans worried about what ails their democracy, non-Americans will profit from a close study of Stanford Professor Bruce Cain’s new book Democracy More or Less: America’s Political Reform Quandary as well.  Cain’s thesis is that different views about the role of citizen participation, representative institutions, interest groups, and apolitical experts in governing the United States produce sharply different prescriptions for reforming its political system.  Non-Americans will recognize that these same views inform reform in their countries, from community driven-development programs that bypass representative institutions to the replacement of elected governments with a cabinet of technocrats.  What makes Cain’s book so valuable, to Americans and non-Americans alike, is that he shows when and why reforms inspired by these competing views improve governance and when and why they make matters worse.

GAB readers will find particularly instructive his analysis of how different theories of government influence the ongoing effort in the United States to police conflicts of interest by elected officials, civil servants, and judges

Continue reading →

National Anticorruption Strategies: Lessons from the Asia-Pacific Region

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The 173 nation that have ratified the U.N. Convention Against Corruption are obliged by article 5 to “develop and implement or maintain effective, coordinated anticorruption policies . . . .”  Many meet this requirement by adopting a national anticorruption strategy, and such strategies are so common that the World Bank, the U4 Anticorruption Resource Centre, and Transparency International have all published works advising how to develop and implement them.  The latest, and most useful entry, comes from the Bangkok office of the U.N. Development Program.   Released December 9,  Anticorruption Strategies: Understanding What Works, What Doesn’t and Why — Lessons from the Asia-Pacific Region draws on the experience of 14 countries in the region  to  help guide policymakers wanting to promulgate a national strategy or revise an existing one. Continue reading →

Corruption Risks in the Criminal Justice System

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The U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Center has just published the introductory chapter to a new U4 issue paper, Corruption Risks in the Criminal Justice Chain and Tools for Assessment.  The forthcoming paper has separate chapters that examine where corruption is most likely to arise in the 1) investigation, 2) prosecution, and 3) trial of a criminal case and in 4) the detention of suspects and incarceration of convicted defendants.  The chapters also describe what tools exist to to assess these risks.  The introductory chapter, co-authored by this writer, summarizes the four chapters.

U4 will release the other four chapters one by one in January 2015.  Join U4’s linked-in group for updates and to interact with the authors who will answer questions and respond to comments in these weeks:

Just How Relevant for Developing Nations is Singapore’s Experience Combating Corruption?

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Policymakers in developing countries hunting for relevant examples of successful efforts to combat corruption are often urged to look to Singapore. (Click here, here, and here for representative publications.) Not only does it regularly score at or near the top of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (in seventh place in the just released 2014 index) but its history is similar to that of developing nations.  For much of the modern era it was under colonial rule, becoming fully independent only in 1965, and independence followed a turbulent decade marked by insurgency and social upheaval.  Again like many of today’s developing nations, at independence it had a backward economy and poorly educated citizenry.  Its success in lifting its citizens out of poverty and creating a modern economy, often attributed at least in part to how well it has done in curbing corruption, makes it an all the more attractive model for developing states.

But Singapore differs in so many critical ways from these nations that its relevance for their development is questionable at best. Continue reading →

A First Draft of a Training Course for Anticorruption Investigators: Comments Please!

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Last week I complained about the poor quality of the training provided to investigators in developing country anticorruption agencies.   Here I offer a (very) rough draft of the topics I think a quality course should cover.  Comments, additional sources, and (gentle) critiques requested. Continue reading →

Better Training for Anticorruption Investigators: Another Dull, Boring, Humdrum, Modest, Unimaginative Proposal to Combat Corruption?

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U.S. Federal Judge Mark Wolf’s proposal to create an international court for corruption crimes was recently the subject of a briefing organized by a commission of the U.S. House of Representatives.  The briefing was the latest example of the attention Judge Wolf’s recommendation for fighting corruption has garnered, attention that has included an appearance on public television where he extolled the merits of his proposal and an interview in a serious policy journal where he expanded on his idea for the court.

Given Matthew’s devastating critique of the court proposal, the attention the judge’s idea continues to attract is surprising to say the least.  What it no doubt reflects is the publicity value of an idea that, at least on its face, appears to be an innovative, imaginative, and “outside the box” way to fight corruption.  Given this media bias, it would do no good to point to further flaws in the judge’s idea (indeed one might write that it would be blogging a dead horse to do so).  What I intend here instead is to protest the media bias for headline grabbing ideas to combat corruption by advancing one that is dull, boring, humdrum, modest, and unimaginative.  The proposal is thus diametrically different in PR value from the judge’s.  It also differs in two substantive ways: it is 1) realistic and 2) will help reduce corruption if followed.

Continue reading →