So-called “corruption proofing” is an ex ante preventive measure that entails review of the form and substance of legal acts (principally statutes or regulations) in order to minimize the risk of future corruption. It is a relatively new strategy in the anticorruption toolkit. As of 2015, 13 countries had enacted some form of corruption proofing: Armenia, Albania, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

While there is some divergence between each country’s specific practices, generally a corruption proofing system requires that draft and/or existing legal acts (statutes and regulations) are subjected to a review process by a designated institution (or institutions), which are tasked with identifying “corruptogenic factors”—aspects of those laws that might create risks of future corruption. Examples of corruptogenic factors that corruption proofing systems have identified include unclear definitions of the rights and duties of public officials; broad discretionary power; over-broad freedom to enact by-laws and other subsidiary legislation; linguistic ambiguity; inadequate sanctions; lack of (or conflicting) regulatory and administrative procedures; and disproportionate burdens on citizens to exercise their rights. The reviewing institution then makes recommendations for changes to the law that would mitigate those risks. The governmental body from which the legal acts originate (the parliament, in the case of statutes) is obligated to consider these recommendations but is not required to implement them, though in some systems the governmental body must state its reasons for rejecting the reviewing institution’s recommendations. Another common practice is that the proofing agency’s recommendations (and, if applicable, the explanations for why they were disregarded) are circulated as an annex to the draft law being debated in the legislature and are also published online, thus providing both lawmakers and citizens with more information about the potential corruptogenic factors associated with the law. Continue reading →