Category Archives: Commentary

Are We Underestimating the Extent of Bribery in the World?

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The astounding figure Richard Rose and Caryn Peiffer report in their new book, Paying Bribes for Public Services, that almost one quarter of world’s population or 1.6 billion people, recently paid a bribe would suggest the answer to the question above is a resounding “No.”  The 1.6 billion figure sounds so fantastically large that the suspicion arises that it is one of those gauzy numbers conjured up using shaky assumptions and questionable sources to capture headlines rather than advance learning.  Yet recent research by the World Bank’ Art Kraay and University of Maryland Professor Peter Murrell shows that, if anything, the Rose and Peiffer 1.6 billion number is low.

Their figure is based on the most solid of evidence: interviews by phone or in-person where respondents are asked whether they had to pay a bribe to obtain a public service.  Transparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, a main source for the 1.6 billion number, is an example.  Surveyors first ask respondents if they or anyone else in their household has had any contact in the past 12 months with anyone associated with any of eight government services: i) the education system, ii) the judiciary, iii) medical or health services, iv) the police, v) registry and permit services, vi) utilities, vii) tax collection or, viii) land service.  If the answer is yes, the surveyor then asks:

In your contact or contacts have you or anyone living in your household paid a bribe in any form in the past 12 months?    

What could be a more reliable way to gather evidence of bribery?  Instead of asking what people think about bribery or what their perceptions of bribery or corruption are, they are asked about their own personal experience, or that of close relatives, with the crime of bribery.  The rub comes with the last phrase in the preceding sentence: the respondent is being questioned about “the crime of bribery.”

Continue reading →

An International Success, Applied in the US: The OECD Law Enforcement Group as a Model for US State Prosecutors

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In the United States, the federal government plays a lead role in prosecuting corruption at the state and local level–and many anticorruption advocates and scholars (both in the US and internationally) credit this federalization of anticorruption enforcement with getting rampant local corruption under control. Indeed, the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section was founded in 1976 precisely because it was thought that federal enforcement efforts were required to fill the vacuum created by the inability or unwillingness of state and local law enforcement authorities to bring cases against government officials in their own communities.

Leaving aside for the moment the substantial federalism and sovereignty concerns that have been leveled against this approach, it seems that the federalization of state and local corruption prosecutions worked, and contributed to a significant reduction in corruption across the United States. For this reason, anticorruption advocates frequently suggest that the US experience with federal enforcement should serve as a model for the international community. For example, Judge Mark Wolf’s proposal for an International Anticorruption Court explicitly draws on the US approach, and was likely influenced by Judge Wolf’s personal experience as a federal prosecutor of state and local officials.

I would like to propose the reverse: The United States should take a page out of the international enforcement playbook to improve state-level prosecution of state and local corruption, by implementing something like the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention’s closed-door meetings of law enforcement officials, but for US state-level prosecutors. Here’s why: Continue reading →

Who Calls the Shots?: Boko Haram and the Legacy of Military Leadership in Nigeria

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When Boko Haram operatives attacked a Nigerian military outpost near the village where I lived in northern Cameroon in 2011, locals condemned the assault. But they admitted that something had to be done about soldiers who, they said, regularly apprehended people and held them for ransom. Boko Haram’s tenor and tactics have grown increasingly radical and destructive since, but the early perceptions of the group highlight, in part, the relationship between corruption and instability. In that case, alleged military corruption directly contributed to violent conflict. Indeed, many analysts have drawn connections between government corruption and the rise of Boko Haram (see here, here, and here).

Transparency International has weighed in on the situation, as well, detailing how corruption has both continued to fuel instability and hampered the response to Boko Haram attacks. TI calls on the Nigerian government to “speak out against corruption and … invite civil society organizations to take part in developing an anti-corruption strategy.” Each course requires significant political will. Nigerian leaders’ historic relationship with the military may do a lot to explain why the requisite political commitment has failed to materialize within past administrations. Continue reading →

Anticorruption Policymaking: The Critical Role of Information

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“. . . [S]ound policies require good information – about the existence, nature, and causes of a problem, about the costs and benefits to the affected public of various possible solutions to the problem, and about the effectiveness of current policies.” Peter H. Schuck, Why Government Fails So Often: And How it Can Do Better. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 162.

Few axioms of policymaking would seem as self-evident as the one above, and few are so often observed in the breach.  Developing the knowledge required for good policymaking can be expensive, time-consuming, and intellectually challenging.  At the same time, policymakers are often under pressure to act; the problem is urgent; the public demands a solution, and they want to address the nation’s ills, or at least appear to address them, quickly.  So policy is made on the basis of incomplete data, hunches, intuition, and plain guesswork. The unfortunate result, as the title of Schuck’s book advertises, is almost always a policy failure.

Anticorruption is an area that seems particularly prone to policymaking on the fly.  In 2007 the U4 Anticorruption Resource Centre examined different countries experiences developing and implementing a national anticorruption strategy.  A major finding: “information, knowledge, and understanding of corruption continue to be a great weakness for the formulation and prioritization of anticorruption initiatives . . . .”  A more recent review of national anticorruption strategies Matthew and I have underway for the UNODC suggests matters have changed little in the intervening years. Countries as different as India, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Thailand have constructed detailed, complex strategies for combating corruption on a thin to non-existent knowledge base.

Given the challenges of building a sound knowledge base for anticorruption policymaking, it is easy to understand why this critical step in the process is so often ignored. Continue reading →

More Flagrant Abuse of CPI Numbers by People and Outlets that Should Know Better

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As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been (figuratively) pounding my fists on the table for a while now about various misuses and misinterpretations of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), particularly in the context of misleading year-to-year comparisons (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). Perhaps I’m overemphasizing a relatively small issue, but it seems that the problem just won’t go away.

Case in point: A piece in last Friday’s New York Times by Carol Giacomo – a member of the New York Times’ editorial board – on recent developments in Indonesia. Most of the piece is a perfectly fine discussion of recent troubling events involving conflict between the Indonesian anticorruption agency (the KPK) and the Indonesian police.  But near the end, in discussing the broader implications of recent events for anticorruption efforts in Indonesia, Ms. Giacomo writes:

Transparency International, which annually rates countries on corruption in their public sectors, says Indonesia has improved its performance on the organization’s “corruption perception index” from 1.9 in 2003 to 34 in 2014[.]

Almost everything about that statement is flawed. Continue reading →

Mexico’s Corrupt Mayors: Who Gets Punished at the Ballot Box, and Why

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In a democracy, when and why are some politicians electorally punished for corrupt acts, while others get off scot-free? Some answers are commonsense: major scandals generally draw more ire than minor malfeasance; media coverage (and hence voter knowledge) matters; and citizens consider a variety of performance indicators—not just corruption or lack thereof—in selecting politicians. But the details are hazy. Some studies suggest politicians who get caught are more likely face electoral loss, but others find little to no such correlation. Likewise, we know anticorruption candidates often flounder for political reasons, but sometimes they succeed against the odds. So what drives, or contributes to, voter backlash against corrupt politicians?

A recent paper by Harvard scholars Horacio Larreguy, John Marshall, and James Snyder addresses this question in the context of mayoral elections in Mexico. Its conclusions should give pause to anticorruption activists looking for broad-brush solutions. In brief, the paper finds that the devil is in the details: local media coverage can reduce a corrupt incumbent’s vote share, but regional or national media doesn’t seem to matter much; voters do punish corrupt politicians on average, but certain political parties are punished much more than others for the same misconduct; and guaranteeing an audit of public programs reduces malfeasance, but merely threatening a possible audit has little if any effect.

These nuanced findings provide insight into voters’ habits, but they also reinforce the notion that corruption is deeply political—and therefore anticorruption interventions must be context-specific. To unpack this all a bit more, consider the study’s main findings: Continue reading →

An Uncommon Victory for India’s Common Man

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Indian voters signaled their distaste for corruption last year with the historic defeat of the Congress Party, but never have Indian voters spoken so overwhelmingly against corruption as in last week’s landslide victory for India’s first anticorruption party, the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party in the Delhi elections. The AAP won 67 of the 70 seats, leaving just three for the BJP (Prime Minister Modi’s party), and shutting out the Congress Party altogether. Dubbed a “political earthquake,” this win for the AAP, led by Arvind Kejriwal, is monumental for several reasons. Continue reading →

The 2014 CPI Data Demonstrates Why, Even Post-2012, CPI Scores Cannot Be Compared Over Time

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A little while back, I expressed some skepticism about whether Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) scores can be compared across time, even after TI changed its methodology in 2012 and claimed that its new scores would now be comparable across years.  More recently, I criticized TI’s 2014 CPI for burying the information on the margins of error associated with the CPI values, and for wrongly asserting that changes in the CPI score between 2013 and 2014 for certain countries (most notably China) were substantively meaningful.  (In fact, not only does the change in China’s score between 2013 and 2014 seem not to be statistically significant, but the change was due almost entirely to the dropping of a source in which China did abnormally well in 2013, and an abnormally large movement in a single other source.) I decided to follow up on this by taking a closer look at the other ten countries that TI singled out as having experienced significant CPI changes (in either direction) between 2013 and 2014.

Upon closer examination, I’m even more certain that CPI scores cannot be compared over time. I’m also more confident in my judgment that TI has been unforgivably sloppy — and downright misleading — in how it, and its representatives, have portrayed the substantive significance of these CPI changes. It turns out that the problem I found with the China calculations was not unusual. For almost all of the eleven countries TI identified as big movers, the CPI changes were driven by (1) the addition or elimination of sources from year to year for particular countries, and/or (2) abnormally large (indeed, implausibly large) movements in a single source. Until TI fixes its methodology, the safest thing to do is to ignore year-to-year changes in the CPI. And for the sake of preserving its own integrity and credibility, TI should either (A) persuasively explain why I am wrong in my analysis of the data (in which case I will gladly concede error), or (B) issue some sort of retraction or correction to its earlier press releases, and either drop the claim that post-2012 CPI scores can be compared across time or fix its methodology going forward.

Allow me to elaborate my analysis of the data: Continue reading →

Egyptian Courts Should Permit Money Laundering Convictions without Conviction on the Predicate Offence

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Prosecuting money laundering and corruption are inextricably interwoven. Corrupt officials, like other sophisticated criminals, frequently resort to various forms of money laundering to conceal their ill-gotten funds. That is why the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) adopted a specific article addressing money laundering. One of the legal challenges in prosecuting money laundering, however, is proving that the property involved is the proceeds of a crime. And one of the ongoing legal controversies on this point concerns whether proving that element of the money laundering offense requires, as a prerequisite, a prior or simultaneous criminal conviction for the predicate offense. Different legal systems have taken different positions on this question, which is perhaps unsurprising. More striking is the fact that, within Egypt right now, this question has divided the circuits of the Court of Cassation (the highest Egyptian criminal court), with no immediate resolution in sight.

One circuit has adopted a “restrictive approach” that requires a prior or simultaneous conviction of the predicate offense as a precondition for a money laundering conviction.  Although a majority of lower courts apply this restrictive approach, another circuit has held—in the case against former President Mubarak’s Minister of interior—that although the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt the illicit origin of the money to secure a money laundering conviction, the prosecution can establish this fact in other ways; a prior conviction for the underlying offense is not necessary. This division of opinion has persisted despite the fact that there is a provision calling for the Court of Cassation’s General Assembly to vote on controversial matters. Unfortunately, the Court does not apply this provision rigorously.

Although both positions have some merit, the Court of Cassation’s General Assembly–or, if it fails to act, the Egyptian legislature–should reject the restrictive approach and allow the prosecution to prove the elements of money laundering, even in the absence of a conviction for the predicate offense. The purported disadvantages of that approach are greatly exaggerated, and it would enhance the Egyptian government’s capacity to combat high-level official corruption, as well as other serious offenses. Continue reading →

Prosecuting Elected Officials for Corruption: A Tale of Four Governors

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As Phil and Rick pointed out a few months ago, America’s domestic anti-bribery laws and the attendant court interpretations are, for lack of a better term, a hot mess. In principle, the crime of bribery is straightforward: To secure a conviction, the prosecutor need only convince the jury that (1) there was some agreement (explicit or otherwise) whereby (2) the official would receive something of value (3) in exchange for using his official position in some manner. Unfortunately, though, that burden of proof often becomes far more complicated when the alleged bribe recipient is a high-ranking elected official. When a politician regularly solicits campaign contributions and simultaneously wields political influence to the benefit of constituents, it is often hard to see where politics ends and corruption begins. And after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in cases like Citizens United and Skilling, prosecutors are left wondering when the corrupting influence of money on politics can still be prosecuted as “corruption.”

Today, I want to step back from this confusion and distill a few lessons that I believe still hold true for any US prosecutor investigating an elected official for bribery. To do that, I consider allegations that have been made against four past and present governors — Rod Blagojevich (Illinois), Andrew Cuomo (New York), Don Siegelman (Alabama), and Robert McDonnell (Virginia) — and ask one loaded question: what does it take to prove that an elected official misused his position in exchange for something of value?

Continue reading →