Some (Semi-Serious) Fun With AI-Generated Anticorruption Content

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I’m not much of a tech person, but even I have been following with great interest the rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly the buzz around ChatGPT, Open AI’s natural language chat bot. As most readers are probably aware, ChatGPT has an uncanny ability to generate decent (if rather formulaic) responses to an extraordinary variety of inquiries. It can respond to follow up questions, make modifications upon request, and (I am told) write and revise computer code. I’ve only played around with it a little, and I haven’t come close to exploring everything it can do, but I thought I’d see what sorts of content in generates when asked some basic questions about the fight against corruption. This started as a kind of just-for-fun experimentation, but I actually think the content that ChatGPT generates on this topic might be useful grounds for further reflection from the anticorruption community, both about how this tool might be helpful in our work, and about how the content this tool generates might prompt us to strive to make our own work more creative, distinctive, and forward-looking.

In the remainder of this blog post, I’ll provide — without any editing — the responses that ChatGPT provided to the following three queries/requests:

  1. How can we fight public corruption effectively?
  2. How can we generate the political will to fight corruption?
  3. Write a keynote address for the International Anti-Corruption Conference.

Here are the AI-generated responses to each: Continue reading →

Why We Shouldn’t Be Overly Concerned About Corruption in the Reconstruction of Ukraine

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Though the war in Ukraine continues to rage, scholars and policymakers around the world have already begun to look ahead to what it will take to help rebuild the country—a project that the Ukrainian government estimates will cost upwards of $750 billion, and which will likely entail substantial international assistance from a broad coalition of countries. Any project of this magnitude—one that involves large government contracts for construction, supplies, and other services—raises concerns about corruption. Indeed, concerns about the potential for widespread corruption in the reconstruction of Ukraine have already been voiced on this blog and elsewhere (see, for example, here, and here). But while this concern should be taken seriously, it should not be exaggerated. There are at least three reasons why the potential for corruption in the Ukrainian reconstruction process, while real, may not be nearly as severe as some of the current pessimistic commentary suggests:

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Islamic States Agree to Anticorruption Convention

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On 28 Jumada Al-Awwal, 1444h (December 22, 2022), Anticorruption Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation agreed to assist one another in preventing, detecting, investigating, and prosecuting corruption crimes.

The Makkah Al-Mukarramah Convention commits OIC’s 57 member states to exchange information and share expertise on bribery, embezzlement, trading in influence, and the other corruption offenses listed in the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. Member states foreign ministers are expected to ratify the Convention by March of this year.

The Convention is an important step forward. For two reasons. One, as a practical matter requests from one OIC member to another for assistance in locating fugitives, securing evidence, or recovering stolen assets often run up against obstacles ranging from outmoded procedures to a lack of trust between law enforcement agencies.

This makes it easy for embezzlers, bribe takers and payers, and other scam artists to escape prosecution.  Not only does the Convention require states to eliminate these barriers, but its creation of a General Secretariat and a Conference of State Parties should help smooth working relations among law enforcement personnel as well as provide a forum for resolving disputes.

The greater impact is surely the Convention’s demonstrative effect. Beyond an immediate effect on behavior, law serves an expressive function, creating and validating social norms. The OIC is in its own words “the collective voice of the Muslim world.” For the representative of the believers in one of the world’s great religions to join the fight against corruption validates and reaffirms the importance of the fight. That the English for “Makkah Al-Mukarramah” is “Holy City of Mecca” serves to emphasize this importance to Muslims of all states.

Corruption: Fuel for Femicide’s Fire

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On January 31, 2022, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of La Paz, Bolivia, regarding new revelations about Richard Choque Flores, who had raped upwards of 70 women and committed at least two femicides. (The term “femicide” refers to the intentional murder of women for gender-motivated reasons.) The La Paz protesters were not simply expressing their horror at Choque Flores’ heinous crimes. They were also denouncing the judicial and prosecutorial corruption that had enabled his continued predation. In fact, Choque Flores had already been arrested in 2015 and sentenced to 30 years in prison. His sentence was then reduced to a house arrest in 2019, whereupon he was able to murder two women from the comfort of his own home. How did Richard Choque Flores manage to get his sentence reduced in the first place? With a bribe of US$3,500 and a bottle of whisky.

Sadly, this story is not unique. In Bolivia as well as other Latin American countries (such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico), femicides not only occur at appallingly high rates, but they rarely ever get resolved. While femicide is certainly rooted in patriarchy, its rampant scope in Latin America cannot merely be explained by the misogyny of individual perpetrators. In 2021 alone, there were at least 108 known femicide cases in Bolivia, of which only 36% were solved. In Mexico, around 10 women are reportedly murdered per day (though the actual number is likely much higher). The femicide epidemic is by no means “accidental, ‘involuntary,’ or the result of ‘mere institutional incapacity.’” Rather, it is the product of profound and systematic corruption, which allows perpetrators to violate women with impunity, while imposing prohibitive barriers to justice for victims and their families.

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Vote Buying: Why the Secret Ballot Isn’t Enough

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Vote buying is an especially pernicious form of corruption, as it threatens to undermine the democratic process, thereby enabling other forms of corruption and misgovernance. One of the most important institutional mechanisms designed to inhibit vote buying is the secret ballot. First adopted in Australia in 1856, the secret ballot is now the norm in liberal democracies. Yet vote buying remains a problem in many such democracies, especially in the developing world (see here, here, and here). To better understand how to fight this form of corruption, it is important to understand why the secret ballot is not sufficient to eliminate the problem. While different communities face distinct challenges, there are several common mechanisms that allow vote buying to persist, even when it is impossible for the vote-buying politicians to verify that the voters they bribed actually voted the way that they had promised.

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Specialized Anticorruption Courts: The Updated U4 Paper and Panel

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Last month, I posted an announcement regarding a panel, which I moderated, at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, on specialized anticorruption courts, which was held in conjunction with the release of the updated U4 Issue paper on that topic. (The original paper, which I coauthored with U4 Senior Advisor Sofie Schütte, was published in 2016.) Several readers who were not able to attend the livestream of the panel expressed interest in seeing the video recording, and I am pleased to say that the video is now available here.

The description of the panel, as it appears in the U4 website linked above, is as follows: Continue reading →

Passing Whistleblower Legislation Is the Next Step in the DRC’s Fight Against Corruption

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In November of 2021, over 3.5 million documents were leaked from a bank in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This so-called “Congo Hold-Up” leak, which included bank statements, emails, contracts, and corporate records, revealed that former Congolese President Joseph Kabila and his inner circle embezzled at least $138 million in public funds between 2013 and 2018. Investigations by media outlets and NGOs exposed a pervasive network of corruption involving the DRC’s Central Bank and national electoral commission, as well as the country’s minerals-for-infrastructure deal with China, a United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic, and more. In response, the head of the DRC’s Inspectorate General of Finance (IGF) condemned the bank’s role in facilitating the corruption, and the Congolese Minister of Justice announced the opening of an investigation to address the allegations. 

Complex corruption schemes such as the one described above are often revealed by whistleblowers. The DRC in particular has a history of whistleblowers exposing corruption, often at great personal risk (for example, here and here). Yet instead of being publicly recognized for their contributions and afforded government protection, these whistleblowers are forced to conceal their identities to avoid retaliation by those they exposed. Their fears are well-founded: The DRC offers little to no legal protection for whistleblowers, and many Congolese whistleblowers have been forced into hiding or exile due to threats, intimidation, assault, and even death sentences. This must change. It is high time for the DRC to pass comprehensive whistleblower protection legislation, and there may be an unusual window of opportunity to do so now.

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Foreign Law Enforcement Agencies to Get U.S. Beneficial Ownership Information

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The cause of financial transparency just recovered some of the ground recently lost when the European Court of Justice struck down the EU directive on public access to corporate ownership data. Last Friday the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) published draft regulations prescribing how certain limited — but quite important – members of the public can obtain information on the actual, beneficial owners of U.S. corporations.

The privileged group consists of law enforcement personnel. And significantly for the global fight against corruption, they include those from non-American as well as American agencies.

The rules for domestic agencies are straightforward, those for non-U.S. authorities less so as they incorporate the conditions Congress put on foreign agencies’ access. The request must be for a law enforcement purpose or national security or intelligence activity; it must be transmitted through a U.S. law enforcement intermediary, and the requesting government must have either an “applicable treaty” with the U.S. or else be a “trusted foreign government.”

For corruption-related cases these conditions would appear to pose no real hurdle. Moreover, in fleshing them out, FinCEN was attentive to foreign authorities’ needs. FinCEN defines “law enforcement purpose,” for example, to include civil forfeiture actions.

Between the diversity of foreign laws and the many types of agreements foreign partners have with U.S. counterparts, however, the agency cautions the draft regulations might still interfere with current arrangements. Anticorruption agencies, prosecution services, and other non-U.S. authorities should therefore examine the draft carefully, ideally in consultation with the U.S. agency or agencies with which they work. Comments are due by February 23.

I see one potential issue and have one question about the proposed rules.

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The FTX Collapse and the Risks of Crypto Corruption

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Last month, the cryptocurrency industry experienced a seismic shakeup as FTX—a Bahamas-based crypto exchange led by the young ex-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried—collapsed. It turns out that FTX was riddled with fraud, and many of the company’s assets are still hidden or missing. Quite understandably, most of the reporting on FTX’s wrongdoing has focused on how FTX defrauded investors, customers, and the U.S. government. But there is another aspect of the case that deserves further scrutiny: the possibility that FTX corrupted Bahamanian regulators, and that this corruption facilitated the company’s other types of malfeasance.

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From the World Cup to the Olympics: Why Are International Sporting Events So Corrupt?

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The recently-concluded FIFA World Cup in Qatar has served as yet another reminder of the corruption that seems to accompany the awarding of hosting rights for major international sporting events. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), in 2010 representatives of Qatar bribed three South American FIFA officials to win the run-off vote against the United States to host the 2022 World Cup. And this came after two members of the FIFA selection committee had already been barred from voting after they had been caught agreeing to sell their votes. This was not an isolated incident. The DOJ also alleged that Russia bribed FIFA officials to host the 2018 World Cup, and indeed more than half of those FIFA officials involved in the 2018 and 2022 host country votes—including FIFA’s then-president Sepp Blatter—have been accused of improper behavior. Nor has this sort of behavior been limited to FIFA. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has had numerous similar scandals. The IOC has launched an investigation into nine members who were bribed to vote for granting Brazil the hosting rights for the 2016 Olympic Games; Sérgio Cabral, the former governor of Rio de Janeiro, admitted to paying $2 million to the former president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) to buy votes to select Rio as the 2016 Olympic host city, and the head of Brazil’s Olympic committee, Carols Nuzman, was sentenced to over 30 years in prison as a result. And when Russia secured the 2014 Winter Olympics bid, it did so with the assistance of the then-vice president of the Olympic Council of Asia, Gafur Rakhimov, an organized crime leader and heroin kingpin.

Why is the process of selecting host cities and countries for major international sporting events so constantly captured by bribery and corruption? There are several inter-related reasons for this ongoing problem:

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