Category Archives: Commentary

Beyond Atlanta: Fixing Corruption in High Stakes Standardized Testing

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Although corruption in educational systems is viewed as a pervasive problem in developing countries, wealthy countries have had their fair share of educational corruption as well. In the United States, for example, the harsh prison sentences in the recent cheating scandal in the Atlanta school system cheating received extensive news coverage this past spring. While it’s true that what happened in Atlanta was particularly wide-spread, involving 44 separate schools (and dozens of principals and hundreds of teachers), this is hardly the first time a significant teacher or administration-driven cheating scandal has come to light. In the last few years, teachers and principals have been caught cheating all over the United States: twenty teachers in Houston were removed from the classroom for cheating on elementary school tests while in Philadelphia, there was a multi-year investigation that involved 138 educators in 27 schools. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing claims that in the last five years, there have been reports of standardized exam cheating in 37 states and the District of Columbia. They have catalogued over fifty different ways that educators helped their students cheat. And although anticorruption efforts in education frequently revolve around the exchange of money or sometimes sex for grades, the sort of cheating involved in these scandals is also a form of educational corruption. Alteration of student tests, even when the students themselves may not benefit from it, is a perversion of the system and a way for teachers and principals to put themselves in line for undeserved awards, given that many educational systems in the U.S. now operate under a high-stakes testing regime in which student performance has a significant impact on teacher and principal evaluations.

Indeed, it is clear that we are not dealing with a few corrupt “bad apples,” but rather with a widespread pattern of teacher and principal corruption. A significant contributor to this problem is the high-stakes testing system described above, which gives teachers and principals to manipulate test results for their own material benefit. Fortunately, there are a few fairly simple steps that would eliminate most of the opportunities for this sort of corruption:

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Singapore and Hong Kong Are Small. So What?

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In my last post, I suggested some reasons why Singapore’s squeaky-clean reputation might not be entirely justified. But nothing I said in that post was meant to deny or disparage Singapore’s extraordinary success in fighting many of the most pervasive and destructive forms of corruption. Indeed, in this post I want to emphasize just how remarkably Singapore—and its fellow Asian city-state Hong Kong—have been in fighting corruption by addressing one of the most common observations raised by those who would either minimize the significance of this achievement, or raise doubts about whether other countries can profitably learn from Singapore and Hong Kong’s experience.

I’m sure many of us who work on international corruption issues have heard something like this from time to time: Whenever we look for success stories or models, someone usually brings up Hong Kong and Singapore as examples of how it is possible, with the right combination of policies and leadership, to get even massive corruption under control within the space of a generation. But, almost as invariably, we hear the skeptical response: “We can’t really learn all that much from Singapore and Hong Kong,” our skeptic intones, “because those are small city-states.”

Now, the skeptics may be right. But what’s always struck me as odd about this exchange (which I’ve heard many times, in one form or another) is that those offering this skeptical view seem to be implicitly assuming that it’s easier to combat corruption in a small city-state than it is in a large country, but they rarely explain why this is true. And at least to me, the case hardly seems self-evident. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it certainly requires more critical scrutiny than it usually receives. Continue reading →

Sharing Responsibility for Managing the Public Fisc: Another Way to Borrow Integrity

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In two recent posts I wrote about innovative ways to “borrow” or “outsource” integrity.  In Guatemala, the government has delegated responsibility for investigating corruption allegations implicating senior political and military leaders to an independent agency accountable to the United Nations Secretary General.  In a number of countries, governments have hired private firms to oversee the assessment of import duties and fees.  Today’s post describes a third variation on the borrowing or outsourcing of integrity: sharing authority over a government’s spending and revenue collection decisions with an international adviser.

This was the core of the Governance and Economic Management Assistance Program, an initiative the international community “persuaded” Liberia’s government to adopt in September 2005.  And the results were immediate and dramatic.  Revenue collection jumped by 75 percent and travel expenses fell by 65 percent in the program’s first year.  Although the program was a response to the rampant corruption plaguing Liberia in the aftermath of a brutal and long-running civil war, it could be easily adopted by any nation committed to dislodging deeply entrenched corruption in a ministry, agency or state-owned enterprise.

The way it worked in Liberia was like this: Continue reading →

Facebook Fever is Not Enough: The Role of Social Media in the Philippines

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The Philippines, long mired in corruption, appears to have made progress on this front in recent years. While the current administration’s anticorruption efforts may have contributed to this progress, some commentators have suggested that social media might actually be playing a bigger role in the decline of graft in the country. Indeed, there are some dramatic examples of social media playing a role in the fight against corruption. For instance, as details of a major scheme involving misappropriation of public money began to surface in 2013, social media platforms exploded with photos and videos pulled from the Instagram and Facebook account of Jeane Napoles, whose mother, Janet, had orchestrated the scheme. Filipinos were shocked and appalled by all that ill-gotten wealth could buy—private planes, expensive handbags, multi-million dollar apartments, and even a new car detailed with an Hermes leather exterior (yes, exterior). Even after these accounts were taken down, photos of the Napoles’ lavish lifestyle continued to circulate. These images made people far more aggressive in condemning the actions of those involved, and even inspired the Million People March, when protestors called for complete elimination of the fund used in the scheme. More recently, Facebook posts about sightings of the younger Napoles helped the media to discover that Jeane, who fled the country in 2013, had in fact returned. She has since been charged with tax evasion.

This is encouraging, and no doubt social media platforms can be useful in the fight against corruption. Nonetheless, I’m cautious about overstating the long-term impact that social media might have on corruption in the Philippines. After all, the Philippines has had an active free press for decades, and past administrations have frequently been challenged by civilian participation and condemnation of corrupt practices. Can we really rely on social media to effect lasting change? Continue reading →

Does Singapore Deserve Its Squeaky-Clean Reputation?

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With the passing of Singapore’s former Prime Minister and elder statesman Lee Kwan Yew last March, there has been a lot of discussion and reflection on his legacy. One aspect of that legacy that has been much celebrated, even among his detractors, has been Singapore’s success in reducing corruption. Indeed, in virtually every international survey or ranking of countries’ corruption levels, Singapore comes out very well. In Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) rankings, for example, Singapore scores 84 out of 100, perceived as the 7th-least corrupt country in the world, and the least corrupt in the Asia. In TI’s most recent Bribe Payers Index (BPI), from 2011, which ranks exporting countries according to their firms’ perceived propensity to pay bribes abroad, Singapore scores 8.3/10, ranked 8th out of 28 countries (in a tie with the United Kingdom). And the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) 2012 evaluation of Singapore’s anti-money laundering system gave the country generally high marks (though with some areas of concern). Singapore is widely touted as a major anticorruption success story (see, for instance, the laudatory introduction to this New Yorker piece) and a model for other countries to follow.

But is this squeaky-clean reputation fully justified? It seems true enough that, from the perspective of the average citizen or firm (whether domestic or foreign), bribery and other forms of petty corruption are relatively uncommon (though not unheard of) in Singapore. And although there have been a number of embarrassing corruption scandals in Singapore in recent years — including the former head of Singapore’s Corrupt Practices Investigations Bureau (the CPIB) embezzling funds from the agency and a former senior police official dismissed for receiving sexual favors in return for influencing government procurement decisions — all countries have incidents of this sort, and in Singapore they seem rather less frequent and less egregious than most other countries, particularly in Asia. Yet I’ve heard many experts on corruption in the Asia-Pacific region grumble–usually off the record–that Singapore is not nearly as “clean” as its reputation suggests.

There are two major complaints about serious corruption in Singapore: Continue reading →

President Xi Hunts Big Prey the Boa Constrictor Way

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Something remarkable is happening in China. It’s not just that tens of thousands of officials have been caught in President Xi Jinping’s corruption dragnet, or that the crackdown continues unabated even though contributors to this blog and former Chinese Presidents alike have long wondered, “surely this can’t go on much longer?” Instead, I’m talking about how President Xi is using his anticorruption program to slowly and methodically take down Zhou Yongkang, the “most powerful man in China.”

The targeting of Mr. Zhou is at once both extraordinary and routine. On the one hand, his downfall is more about politics than corruption, retribution for backing the wrong man in the transition that catapulted Mr. Xi to power in 2012. On the other, the purging of rivals is seemingly a rite of passage for Chinese leaders; Mao did it aplenty in the 1950s and Presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin “each engineered a high-profile sacking of a political rival (Shanghai boss Chen Liang and Beijing boss Chen Xitong, respectively).” But even then, there’s something different about Zhou’s fall from power — he’s not a provincial party chief, he’s a former member of the almighty Politburo Standing Committee, the former head of China’s feared domestic security services, and the biggest “tiger” yet targeted by President Xi.

And it’s that realization — that Zhou’s fall is momentous — that raises the most interesting question in this dramatic collision of corruption and politics: How did a President, who came to power without a solid independent base within the factionalized Communist Party, manage in just three years to take down the “most powerful man in China”? The answer lies in an intuitive but methodically executed four-step plan developed by President Xi and his Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. In the hope of shedding some light on how other nations might similarly take down the simultaneously corrupt and dangerously powerful without undermining political stability, let’s examine how President Xi has slowly choked off Mr. Zhou’s power.

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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 →

Corruption Could Kill the Elephants–It’s Time to Ban All Ivory Trade Now

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The ivory trade is spiraling out of control, accelerating very quickly in the past five years especially. A new study estimates that 100,000 elephants were killed in 2010, 2011, and 2012. With only about 400,000 elephants left, conservationists believe African elephants could be extinct in the wild within the decade. Unfortunately, this is a problem with no clear solutions, not least because corruption enables every aspect of the ivory trade. Inadequate enforcement of already-leaky laws has contributed to a situation wherein organized criminals collaborate with government officials to supply illegal ivory that is now worth more than its weight in gold.

Some have suggested that the ivory trade should be opened up and regulated, allowing governments to levy taxes to pay for increased enforcement and conservation. Most who have studied the issue conclude that this idea is madness — rampant corruption at every link in the supply chain means that illegal ivory would have no trouble working its way into the legal markets. The presence of a legal market, with legitimate supply channels, would merely accelerate the elephants’ demise.

What is needed instead is a renewal of the bans on ivory trading that were set in the late 1980s, the last time the ivory trade threatened the elephants’ existence so dramatically. Of course, corruption can undermine a ban as well. Nonetheless, a reinvigorated ban regime would be an important step forward, and seeking it is thus a worthy goal. Continue reading →

More on International Principles for Anticorrution Agencies: A Cautionary Example from Human Rights?

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In my last post, I raised questions about the 2012 Jakarta Statement on Principles for Anticorruption Agencies (ACAs). My main concerns were (1) that many of the principles were framed in such open-ended and flexible terms that they failed to really commit to anything in particular; (2) that a number of the principles that do endorse concrete criteria are questionable on substantive grounds; and (3) the statement failed to acknowledge or address a key tension between its calls for more mechanisms to promote ACA independence and its call (in more general terms) for mechanisms to preserve accountability and prevent ACAs from abusing their power. Here I want to follow up on the first concern, and highlight recent research on the effect of the 1991 Paris Principles on the Design of National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs).

The comparison between the Jakarta Statement and the Paris Principles is apt. Samuel De Jaegere, a UN official and one of the main proponents and advocates of the Jakarta Statement, published a 2012 article outlining principles for anticorruption agencies, which the Jakarta Statement itself tracks closely, though not precisely. (I am not sure whether De Jaegere’s paper formed the basis of the Jakarta Statement, or whether both the paper and the Statement were the result of ongoing behind-the-scenes discussion and dialogue, but they are clearly related.) De Jaegare’s article specifically references the Paris Principles for NHRIs as a model that ACAs could follow, and goes so far as to suggest that the voluntary “accreditation” system that the International Coordinating Committee of National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (ICC) has created for NHRIs (in which letter grades are assigned based on the degree of compliance with the Paris Principles) could be emulated for ACAs. As De Jaegere puts it, “The main lesson learnt from NHRIs for ACAs is: a set of principles and a monitoring mechanism may strengthen the independence, effectiveness and success of ACAs.”

That sounds appealing, but recent empirical research on the actual impact of the Paris Principles should give us pause. That research, by Katerina Linos of Berkeley Law School and Tom Pegram of University College London, suggests that while the Paris Principles appears to have succeeded in promoting adherence to the Principles’ fixed terms (in both democratic and authoritarian states), the results were quite different for those Principles framed in more flexible, open-ended terms: For those provisions, implementation generally did not improve, and in authoritarian states adherence to those Principles articulated in flexible language sometimes actually worsened. Linos and Pegram speculate, plausibly in my view, that states responded strategically to the Paris Principles, redirecting their efforts toward tasks that were specified in firm, precise, unconditional language (where there would be less room for dispute about compliance), and away from the more amorphous, open-ended tasks.

Linos and Pegram’s paper is clever, in part because they have found (or believe they have found) a clever way around an inferential problem that ordinarily bedevils efforts to assess the impact of international agreements on state behavior. Their results, insofar as we believe that they are valid, may have important implications for how we think about attempts to emulate the approach to international assessment of NHRIs for ACAs. Let me say a few words about each. 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 →