Patronage Wars: The Philadelphia Parking Authority Edition

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Patronage hiring is a widespread practice throughout the world. While patronage has its apologists, its tendency to facilitate corruption makes it an undesirable phenomenon that should be rooted out. Patronage isn’t just a problem in poor countries—it’s also alive and well in rich countries like the United States. The recent scandal at the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) is a case in point.

While the PPA may be famous across the country for its inspectors’ telegenic antics, in Philadelphia the PPA has long been known as a patronage mill dominated by Republicans. In December 2017, the Pennsylvania Auditor General released two separate reports blasting the PPA for closed hiring practices, inflated salaries, questionable spending and contracting, and pervasive sexual harassment. The reports place blame squarely on the former executive director, Vince Fenerty, Jr., who operated as an “unchecked tyrant.” Fenerty, who started out as a Republican ward leader, personally oversaw all hiring decisions at the PPA. Although the PPA has an HR department, no one ever checked up on applicants’ references or qualifications. In fact, Fenerty did not select applicants from the pool of those who submitted applications to the HR Department. As the Auditor General’s report put it, “the former Executive Director had other unknown means of obtaining applications.” He usually interviewed only one person per position.

The PPA’s utter ineffectiveness and shady practices meant that, between 2012 and 2017, $77.9 million was lost or uncollected. Revenue from the PPA goes to the chronically-underfunded School District of Philadelphia, meaning that Fenerty’s misbehavior also had a direct effect on Philadelphia schoolchildren, who missed out on the teachers, textbooks, and technology that $77.9 million could have funded.

How did things go so wrong for so long at the PPA, and what does this tell us about the problems with patronage hiring more generally? Continue reading →

Guest Post: The UK’s Compensation Principles in Overseas Corruption Cases–A New Standard for Aiding Victims of Corruption?

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Susan Hawley, Policy Director at Corruption Watch, to contribute today’s guest post:

The issue of whether money from foreign bribery settlements should go back to the people of affected countries has generated a fair amount of heat over the years. Back in 2013, the World Bank’s Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR) asked whether countries whose people were most harmed by corrupt practices were being left out of the bargain in foreign bribery settlements. According to the StAR study, out of the $6 billion in monetary sanctions imposed for foreign bribery in 395 settlements between 1999 and 2012, only 3.3%, or $197 million, had been returned to the countries where the bribes were paid. Those statistics have provoked considerable controversy, as has the question whether the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) requires states parties to share money from foreign bribery settlements with affected countries. Yet the fact remains that when the huge fines paid by US and European companies for bribing officials in developing countries go into the treasuries of the US and Europe, while the people of those countries affected by that bribery get nothing, this creates a serious credibility and legitimacy problem for the international anticorruption regime.

For that reason, the UK enforcement bodies’ publication, this past June 1st, of joint principles to compensate overseas victims of economic crime is a welcome development, and provides another opportunity to think again about what is possible and what is desirable in terms of compensating the people of affected countries when companies get sanctioned for paying bribes. The UK Compensation Principles were first mooted and drafted at the 2016 London Anti-Corruption Summit; that Summit’s Joint Communique recognized that “compensation payments and financial settlements … can be an important method to support those who have suffered from corruption,” and led nine countries (though only four from the OECD) to commit to develop common principles for compensation payments to be made “safely, fairly and in a transparent manner to the countries affected.” The UK’s new principles are an effort to fulfill that Summit commitment. They commit the UK’s enforcement bodies to:

  • Consider compensation in all relevant cases;
  • Use whatever legal means to achieve it;
  • Work cross-government to identify victims, assess the case and obtain evidence for compensation, and identify a means by which compensation can be paid in a transparent, accountable and fair way that avoids risk of further corruption; and
  • Proactively engage where possible with law enforcement in affected states.

Interestingly, these principles have been in informal operation since late 2015, which helps shed some light on how these principles are likely to operate in practice. Continue reading →

Will Mexico’s New President End Procurement Corruption?

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Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador pledged Sunday in his victory speech night to eradicate corruption and to hold his friends and supporters accountable.  The Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad (IMCO) has an easy way citizens can see whether he keeps his promise.

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Is the West Being Too Critical of Corruption in Ukraine? The Debate Continues

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A couple weeks back I posted a commentary on an interesting debate over the West’s approach to promoting anticorruption in Ukraine. On the one side, Adrian Karatnycky (the Managing Partner of a consulting firm that assists international clients with government relations in Ukraine) and Alexander Motyl (Professor of Political Science at Rutgers) published a piece arguing that the West’s approach to promoting anticorruption was misguided, for two reasons: First, because (according to the authors) there was too much focus on punishing individual wrongdoers rather than on institutional reform, and second because the emphasis on the failings of the Ukrainian government (and the wrongdoing of individual Ukrainian officials) was undermining a reformist government, and would likely lead Ukrainian voters to embrace populist demagogues. On the other side, Daria Kaleniuk (the executive director of a Ukrainian civil society organization called the Anti-Corruption Action Center) countered that the only reason the Ukrainian government has made any progress on anticorruption reforms is because of pressure from the West, and that holding individual wrongdoers accountable is essential to making progress on this issue and restoring the faith of the Ukrainian people in the institutions of government.

My own take was that Ms. Kaleniuk is likely correct that individual accountability, though not sufficient, is a necessary component of an effective anticorruption strategy; Karatnycky and Motyl’s implicit argument that Ukraine could make headway on the corruption problem without an effective system for holding individual wrongdoers accountable, as long as the country pursues “institutional reforms” (like privatization and de-monopolization), struck me as both facially implausible and inconsistent with what we know about successful anticorruption reforms elsewhere. Karatnycky and Motyl’s second point, about “messaging,” struck me as harder. On the one hand, it’s true that emphasizing only problems and failures and shortcomings might breed cynicism, frustration, and possibly political instability. But on the other hand, exposing corruption may be the only way (or at least the most effective way) to mobilize public opinion to address some very real problems.

I probably wouldn’t have returned to this topic (about which, I can’t repeat enough, I lack genuine expertise), but Mr. Karatnycky and Professor Motyl published a rejoinder to Ms. Kaleniuk last week that I think merits further commentary. The new piece makes a number of separate points, and I won’t touch on all of them. But if I had to sum up their central argument, it would go like this:

Don’t be too critical of the ruling elites—even if those elites are pretty corrupt, and even if the only reason they’ve done much of anything about corruption in the past is because they’ve been pressured or shamed or coerced into doing so. If you’re too mean to them, they might lose the support of the people—and what comes next might be much worse.

That summary, which I admit is a bit of a caricature, might seem unfair. But I don’t think it is. Indeed, I not only think it’s an accurate distillation of Karatnycky and Motyl’s main argument, but I actually think that it’s an argument worth taking seriously, and in some circumstances might even be right. But I’m skeptical it’s right in most cases, and I remain to be convinced that it’s right about Ukraine. Under most conditions, I think it’s probably wrongheaded and dangerous to say that we shouldn’t criticize a government for failing to tackle corruption or try to expose the corruption of individual politicians out of a concern that doing so might undermine the legitimacy of the government.

So, before I proceed, let me make clear that my caricature—“Don’t say mean things about the kinda-corrupt-but-kinda-reformist incumbents”—really is a fair distillation of the argument. Here the key passages from Karatnycky and Motyl’s most recent piece: Continue reading →

The Urgent Need for Innovation in India’s Public-Sector Appointments Process

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A public sector job is one of the most prized forms of employment in India, for a variety of reasons including prestige, attractive entry-level pay, a multitude of employment benefits, and unparalleled job security. The selection process is governed by a constitutionally-mandated scheme involving competitive examinations, and the competition for places is maddeningly intense, with millions of aspirants vying for a handful of vacancies; many candidates spend years “waiting” to clear the exam. The competitive examination system for public service appointments dates back to a 19th-century effort by the British Imperial Civil Service to crack down on corruption and patronage; after independence, India choses to retain this selection method, for similar anticorruption reasons. But it hasn’t worked: despite “merit-based” appointments, the Indian public service has remained plagued with corruption and bribery—and all too often, as in the recent  multi-billion-dollar scams that hit Indian public-sector banks, public officials are at the heart of criminal conspiracies.

Common explanations for the persistence of corruption in the Indian civil service are the relatively low pay of government jobs (notwithstanding the benefits and perks), as well as the excessive size of India’s public sector overall. Both points are valid, but we also need to consider problems with the selection process itself. Worryingly, research has suggested that the Indian public sector attracts corrupt candidates (see here and here), which contributes to the persistence of a culture of corruption in the civil service. Two reforms to the current selection system could potentially help reduce this problem: Continue reading →

What Happened to Hong Kong?

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Hong Kong has long been held up as one of the leading examples of a jurisdiction that successfully tackled systemic corruption. Up until the 1970s, Hong Kong had a reputation as one of the most corrupt cities in the world, with bribes solicited in the open and the police force considered to be “the best force in the world that one could buy with money.” But the creation of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974 marked the beginning of a new era, and dramatically changed the situation after only a couple of decades of sustained anti-graft efforts. In 1996, Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) ranked Hong Kong as the 18th least-corrupt among the 54 countries/regions surveyed, putting it on par with Japan (17th) and the U.S. (15th), and Hong Kong has stayed near the top of those rankings ever since.

But with Hong Kong’s reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, fears began to emerge that a “slow invasion of corruption from across border” would take place. In the first two decades after the handover, not much changed, at least not in the international corruption perception rankings. But in the last few years, such fears have been rekindled. Consider a number of troubling cases:

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Guest Post: More on the Hazards of Public Beneficial Ownership Registries–What Stephenson and Others Miss

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Today’s guest post, from Geoff Cook (the CEO of Jersey Finance), continues an ongoing debate an exchange we’ve been hosting here at GAB regarding the desirability of public (as opposed to confidential) registries of the ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) of companies and other legal entities. This exchange was prompted by a piece that Martin Kenney, a lawyer specializing in asset recovery in the British Virgin Islands, published on the FCPA Blog, which criticized the UK’s decision to mandate that the 14 British Overseas Territories create public UBO registries. Mr. Kenney’s post prompted reactions from Rick Messick and from me. Our critical reactions stimulated another round of elaboration on the critique of the UK’s decision, with a new post from Mr. Kenney and another from Mr. Cook. I subsequently replied, explaining why I did not find Mr. Kenney’s or Mr. Cook’s criticisms fully persuasive. Mr. Kenney responded to that post earlier this month, and in today’s post Mr. Cook contributes his critical reactions to my response: Continue reading →

You Are Reorganized! Sierra Leone President Bio’s Ingenious Way of Firing the Anticorruption Commissioner

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Leaders fearful that a corruption investigation is closing in on them or colleagues have Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio to thank for coming up with a most ingenious to rid himself of the pesky head of his nation’s anticorruption agency.  While the anticorruption law bars presidents from summarily firing the anticorruption commissioner, requiring first a tribunal to find him or her unfit to serve and then two-thirds of the parliament to agree, President Bio neatly cut through this cumbersome red tape with the following missive his aid sent Anticorruption Commissioner Ade Macauley —   Restructuring letter

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Guest Post: More Transparency Is Needed to Fight Grand Corruption in the Pharmaceutical Sector

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Today’s guest post is from Till Bruckner, the founder of TranspariMED:

In the pharmaceutical sector, public agencies are routinely handing over billions in public money to private companies for products whose value they cannot accurately assess, because the vendors control the flow of information generated by clinical trials. (Even the purchasing price is often kept secret, but that is another story.) If we observed this sort of opacity in the public procurement sector, it would immediately raise red flags. If public contractors were taking billions from governments in exchange for products of dubious quality that the governments cannot assess, the anticorruption community would be–rightly–up in arms. But for the pharmaceutical industry, this is business as usual.

Consider, as one particularly egregious example, what can only be described as an $18 billion heist of public money by a pharma company. In 2006, governments around the world began stockpiling Tamiflu, an anti-retroviral drug, due to fears that outbreaks of bird flu (and later swine flu) could turn into a lethal global pandemic. The evidence available at the time suggested that the drug was safe and effective at reducing the symptoms of influenza. In total, 96 counties accumulated enough Tamiflu to treat 350 million people. Then, in 2009, a doctor noticed that the results of eight clinical trials of Tamiflu were missing from the public record. (Worldwide, around half of all clinical trials have never reported their results.) After a struggle lasting four years, independent scientists finally got the company to turn over the relevant data from these trials—and concluded that the drug did little, if anything, to help patients.

This example is especially egregious, but it is not otherwise exceptional. Amazingly, comprehensive information on the safety and effectiveness of drugs is not only inaccessible to independent scientists, but also to government agencies. When a drug company applies for a marketing license, it has to submit detailed documentation from every relevant trial to regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Regulators review these submissions, called Clinical Study Reports (CSRs) – and then promptly lock them away in their confidential archives. This is especially frustrating for scientists working for health technology agencies, who are tasked with assessing the cost-effectiveness of different drugs but are often unable to access CSRs. To date, only the European Medicines Agency systematically releases (some) CSRs.

Politicians have tried to bring transparency into the sector, but the laws they pass often remain unenforced. In the United States, the 2007 FDA Amendment Act made it compulsory for companies and universities to publish the summary results of some clinical trials on public registries. (Summary results are a kind of “executive summary” of a clinical trial; they are far shorter and less detailed than CSRs, but still better than nothing). In 2015, an investigation by STAT News found that pharmaceutical companies routinely violated the law. The law stipulates a fine of up to $10,000 for every day a result is overdue. In theory, Big Pharma has already racked up over $25 billion in fines. In practice, the FDA has yet to collect a single cent. In the European Union, a similar regulation exists, but there too it remains unenforced by national agencies. In Britain, a 2013 parliamentary inquiry called for greater transparency, but its recommendations were largely ignored.

Last December, a coalition of four health integrity organisations issuing a wake-up call for governments to finally get serious about clinical trial transparency. Transparency International Pharmaceuticals & Healthcare (PHP), TranspariMED, Cochrane, and the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency (CRIT) released a study that documents in detail how opacity in the sector harms patients, prevents public health agencies from making informed decisions, wastes public health funds, slows down medical progress, and exposes shareholders to substantial risks. The study also shows that clinical trials can be made significantly more transparent without introducing new legislation. Public research funders could demand that grantees report the results of publicly funded trials. Regulators could make continued market access conditional on companies agreeing to make CSRs publicly available. And in many cases, simply enforcing the rules already on the book could make a huge difference – and the costs of enforcement could easily be covered by imposing fines for noncompliance.

The medical research community has long called for greater transparency in medical research. The AllTrials campaign, which calls for all clinical trials to be registered and fully reported, has attracted the support of over 700 groups, including the American Medical Association and dozens of patient groups, and TranspariMED is currently building a broader coalition to push for greater transparency in the sector. It’s high time for the wider anticorruption community to join the fray.

Defining Declinations: A New Enforcement Action

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In recent years, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has, with increasing frequency, been resolving alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) with formal declinations (that is, a statement that the DOJ will not prosecute the corporation). Indeed, the possibility of resolution through declination is a centerpiece of the DOJ’s new Corporate Enforcement Policy (CEP). Under the new policy, the DOJ will presumptively grant a declination to a corporation implicated in potential FCPA violations, so long as the corporation voluntarily reports the possible FCPA violations to the government, agrees to implement internal remediation measures, and disgorges any ill-gotten gains. (When that last condition applies, the resolution is a “declination with disgorgement.”)

But what exactly is a “declination”? One would think that the answer would be straightforward, but it turns out to not to be so easy. Typically, declinations have been thought of in the negative, meaning what they are not: prosecutions. Generally, U.S. prosecutors have the discretion to decide whether to bring an enforcement action against a party that may have violated the law. If the DOJ decides that it is not in the interest of justice or otherwise worthwhile to pursue a given case, then the DOJ has “declined” to prosecute. However, in the FCPA context (and possibly other contexts as well), a formal “declination” should be thought of as something more than simply a decision not to prosecute. And that distinction turns out to have practical consequences for the types of penalties a formal “declination” can legally support.

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