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 →

The Jakarta Statement on Principles for Anti-Corruption Agencies: A Critique

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In response to one of my early posts (from over a year ago) on the problem of politicized anticorruption enforcement, Samuel De Jaegere of UN Office of Drugs & Crime (UNODC) helpful drew my attention to the Jakarta Statement on Principles for Anti-Corruption Agencies, a non-binding resolution promulgated by representatives of anticorruption agencies (ACAs) from around the world. The Statement was endorsed by the International Association of Anti-Corruption Authorities at its Panama meeting last year, and noted (though not explicitly endorsed) also by the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) States Parties in its most recent resolution on the prevention of corruption.

I’ll admit that although I’d heard references to the Jakarta Statement before, I’d never actually read it. Now I have. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. On the one hand, I recognize that this is a political document, rather than an analytical document, and perhaps as a political document it will achieve its intended purpose, and do some good in the world in the process. After all, an international manifesto that affirms the importance of preserving the independence and authority of anticorruption enforcement is likely valuable, and perhaps the Jakarta Statement will prove useful — or perhaps has already proved useful — for beleaguered anticorruption agencies and their supporters to defend against attacks and to build up legitimacy.

On the other hand, as an operational document and guide to institutional design, I have to say I found the Jakarta Statement to be mostly unhelpful and/or simplistic. I want to be cautious in how I phrase this, because I am sympathetic to and respectful of the motivation behind the Jakarta Statement, and I don’t have enough of a sense of the nuances of international politics and norm diffusion to be able to evaluate its actual impact on the world. But taking it on its own terms as a set of institutional principles and guidelines, I was disappointed. I think the international community can and should do better when outlining the basic principles and objectives for ACAs. In the spirit of playing Devil’s Advocate, in the hopes of stimulating some critical debate on this critical issue, let me lay out my critique of the Jakarta Statement as it currently stands: Continue reading →

Anticorruption Co-opted: Problems with the Purported Polygamy-Corruption Connection

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Whether or not a country’s culture can be blamed for causing corruption has come up on the blog before.  This question comes up in a great variety of contexts, but one that may be less familiar to many readers is the purported causal link between polygamy and corruption. Polygamy has been called a “breeding ground” for corruption, and blamed for the spread of corruption in, for example, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Sudan. But the empirical evidence to support this claim is very weak. Given that weakness, it’s somewhat puzzling why the claim has gotten so much traction in some quarters. This may be one of those cases where the alleged link between a cultural practice (here, polygamy) and corruption is motivated less by a concern about corruption, and more by objections to–and deep social clashes over–the cultural practice. Corruption, in other words, may be a stalking horse for other concerns. Continue reading →

Guest Post–Reflections on the “Guatemalan Spring”

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Mathieu Tromme, Senior Research Fellow at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, contributes the following guest post:

Guatemala is in the midst of its worst political crisis in the two decades since the end of the country’s civil war in 1996. Weekly marches, sit-ins and demonstrations keep drawing tens of thousands to the streets, denouncing corruption and demanding the President’s resignation, as well as a purge of politics and the judiciary (among other things). The scope and size of the demonstrations has been something of a surprise, given that the Guatemalan public often seems uninterested in political affairs or reluctant to express dissent. Although the protests originated in the capital, they have now spread to the whole country, and brought lower and middle classes together. The main cause of this discontent? Public anger over a string of corruption scandals.

The demonstrations—which some believe are the start of a “Guatemalan Spring”— began this past April, when the Office of the Public Prosecutor against Impunity, together with the UN-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG in Spanish) published an investigative report linking fraud in the Customs Department to the Vice President’s Office. Specifically, Vice President Baldetti’s private secretary, Mr. Monzón Rojas, stands accused of being at the helm of a wide tax and customs fraud scheme known as La Linea (“the line”), which has defrauded the state of about US$120 million. Although Vice President Baldetti, tried to distance herself from her Secretary (who’s still on the run), mounting public and political pressure forced her to resign on May 8. In addition, there were further revelations that lawyers representing detainees in connection with La Linea attempted to bribe Chief Justices of the Supreme Court. And there were other scandals as well: the head of the Ministry of Energy and Mining lost his post over corruption charges, the Ministers of the Interior, Environment, and Energy resigned, and the President of the Central Bank and the head of the Guatemalan Institute of Social Security (who was formerly the President’s personal secretary) have been forced to resign after being accused of fraud and influence peddling.

Although there are many interesting aspects of these anticorruption protests, let me highlight what seem to me especially important features of both the protests and the underlying problems that triggered them—features which, though specific to Guatemala, may have broader implications for the fight against entrenched political corruption. Continue reading →

TI Report on Anti-Bribery Compliance Programs in the Defense Industry: Some Quick Reactions

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Last April Transparency International UK released a very interesting report on the quality of corporate anti-bribery compliance programs in the defense industry. (This was the second such report; the first was issued in 2015). The report evaluated the ethics and anti-bribery compliance programs of 163 defense companies along five dimensions (leadership & governance, risk management, policies & codes, training, personnel & helplines) using publicly available information, supplemented with additional internal information from 63 cooperating firms, and assigned each firm a letter grade (A-F). The most eye-catching result, and the one that has gotten the most attention in the press releases and reporting on the report, is how badly the defense industry seems to be doing overall on this issue: Of the 163 firms included in the review, there were 4 As, 23 Bs, 29 Cs, 31 Ds, 19 Es, and 57 Fs. Thus, fewer than 17% of the defense firms examined scored in the A or B range, while close to half (47%) received a failing grade of E or F.

That’s certainly a notable and important (and depressing) finding, but digging a bit deeper, there are a few other interesting features of the report that have gotten a bit less attention, and are worth highlighting. 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 →

Anticorruption Bibliography–June 2015 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

Fighting Officer Involved Domestic Violence: Preventing Police Corruption from Hindering Investigation

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Corruption within police forces is a well-known foe that rears its head in a dozen different ways. Police corruption is often discussed in terms of monetary abuses, from kickbacks to shakedowns to opportunistic theft. Yet these crimes are far from the only form of police misconduct. For example,there have been numerous incidents in which police officers demand sex from prostitutes in exchange for allowing them to continue working–a form of corruption that falls under the general category of “sextortion,” which I wrote about in an earlier post. Less discussed is the corruption that makes it hard to fight sky-high rates of officer involved domestic violence (OIDV).

OIDV is a serious problem, in the United States and (presumably) elsewhere. In the U.S., two studies, one with 728 police officers and one with 425 officers, found that 40% of officers self-reported that in the previous six months they had “lost control and behaved violently towards their spouse.” The comparable rate in the general population is roughly one-fourth as high. The reasons for these high OIDV rates are complex and not fully understood. Some advocates believe that aspects of police training give officers who are violent at home the knowledge and capability to target and intensify their abuse. Others make the case that the amount of violence police are exposed to as part of their job spills over to the home. But irrespective of the causes of OIDV, corruption within the police department makes fighting OIDV significantly more difficult. Continue reading →

Scorpions with Wax Wings: How Anticorruption Agencies Can Avoid Flying Too Close to the Sun

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Public rhetoric about the battle against corruption often centers on the need for “zero tolerance”–the need for institutions, including perhaps most importantly law enforcement agencies–to aggressively root out graft through vigorous prosecution, no matter the circumstances.  What more often goes unsaid, though, is that actually following such strategies may end up being counterproductive.  The aggressive pursuit of corruption-busting litigation can lead to political elites pulling the rug out from underneath the anticorruption agency (ACA).  In South Africa, for example, the National Assembly dissolved the Scorpions, a special investigative unit, once it began going after high-ranking government officials.

As a result of the danger of being undercut, ACAs face an inherent tension in their work: they want to fight corruption to the greatest extent possible, but fighting it too aggressively can lead to the agency’s ability to perform its duties being completely undercut.  How far, then, can an ACA push? Though the unique context of any given ACA means no universal lessons exist, there are some general guidelines ACAs should consider when shaping their anticorruption efforts, if they want to avoid a backlash that ultimately consolidates the power of the corrupt:

Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Role of Compensation Systems in Promoting Anti-Bribery (Non-)Compliance

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GAB is pleased to welcome back anti-bribery consultant Richard Bistrong, who contributes the following guest post:

These days, most sophisticated multinational firms, at least those that might be subject to liability under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or similar laws, have official anti-bribery compliance programs. But as many observers have rightly noted, while formal control systems are important, they have their limits: the formal rules in place, or what top-level management asserts when setting the “tone from the top,” may often differ from what actually happens on the ground. As I’ve emphasized my earlier posts on this blog, understanding what actually happens out in the field requires careful attention to the actual incentives of the people on the front lines: the regional managers, salespeople, and the like. And with respect to these individuals, many corporations that have seemingly robust anti-bribery programs, and whose C-Suite executives say all the right things about ethics and integrity and zero tolerance, are actually creating incentives that foster corruption. Here I want to focus on incentive plans for international sales, marketing, and business development teams. I have identifies three common features of the compensation system for salespeople may contribute substantially to bribery risk. Continue reading →