Tag Archives: data

President Biden’s “Fishy” Corruption Statistics Called Out

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Thanks to GAB Editor-in-Chief Matthew Stephenson, readers of this blog have known for years not to believe the many numbers thrown around about the global cost of corruption.  As he has shown in a series of posts, (here, here, here, and here) and in a 2021 paper for the U4 Anticorruption Resource Centre with Cecilie Wathne, these estimates are, not to put too fine a spin on it, baloney. Or what I have somewhat scatologically termed WAGs (Wild A** Guesses).

Unfortunately, White House staff apparently (and disappointingly) neither read GAB nor follow U4’s work. That is the only explanation for why they would have let President Biden say at the launch the other day of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity that “corruption saps between 2 to 5 percent of global GDP.”

Fortunately, Washington Post crack fact checker Glenn Kessler didn’t let the President’s citation of what his paper termed a “fishy statistic” go unchallenged. Relying on Matthew’s and Cecile’s paper, backed up by a chat with U.S T.I. director Gary Kalman, Kessler termed the 2-5 percent statistic “so discredited” that it should have never been “uttered by the president of the United States.” The White House, he wrote, must in the future do a better job of vetting such “dubious” data.

While I trust White House staff will, I hope the error in no way hope cools theirs or the president’s commitment to upping America’s anticorruption game. After all, as the president also said at the Indo-Pacific launch, corruption “steals our public resources,. . . exacerbates inequality [and] hollows out a country’s ability to deliver for its citizens.”  All unequivocally true. No fishy data required. QED

Hiding in Plain Sight: How the Federal Elections Commission Can Use Existing Disclosures To Detect Campaign Finance Fraud

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Last August, U.S. Congressman Duncan Hunter was indicted for misuse of campaign funds for personal benefit. The Justice Department alleges that Hunter conspired with his wife, whom he appointed campaign manager, to steal from his campaign to support their lavish lifestyle: the campaign spent $15,000 on airline tickets and hotel rooms for Hunter’s children and relatives, a $14,000 Thanksgiving trip to Italy, and for other expenses like $700 for seven adult and five children’s tickets to see “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

Though Representative Hunter’s conduct is only now being investigated, the allegations of improper spending go back to 2009, and many of the expenses now under scrutiny were detailed in his campaign’s filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). FEC filings are public records, readily available and searchable (via simple keyword searches on the FEC’s webpage) to anyone interested in looking. For example, Representative Hunter is a “vaping” enthusiast (even smoking his e-cigarette in Congress). Using the FEC’s webpage and a simple search for the words “cigar,” “smoke,” and “tobacco,” I found that Representative Hunter’s  2015-16 campaign expenditures include hundreds of dollars of spending at a cigar lounge, smoke shop, and tobacco company in his home district. Similar search results through the FEC website show all sorts of eyebrow-raising transactions.

So why weren’t the problems detected earlier? The problem, in cases like this, is not that the FEC doesn’t have enough information to identify suspicious activity—it’s that it has too much information. The FEC has massive amounts of data, making the detection of fraud a needle-in-the-haystack problem. The FEC relies largely on complaints and referrals to guide its enforcement process, with the result that enforcement remains anemic.  In 2017, for example, the FEC levied administrative fines in 215 matters totaling under $2 million, despite having data on 23.4 million line-item disbursements and 34.5 million individual contributions, not even counting electioneering communication transactions and the massive data on political action committees (PACs).

Waiting for referrals, or screening data by hand, is not an effective way for the FEC’s roughly 300 employees to detect corruption or fraud in campaign finance. There are no silver-bullet solutions; fraud detection is a fundamentally difficult, especially when fraudsters take steps to cover their tracks. But there are some steps the FEC can take to better monitor fraudulent expenditures to identify suspicious cases early on:

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Stealing a City: Lessons from Bell, California

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In 2010, a corruption scandal rocked the city of Bell, California, as eight top city officials were arrested for what the Los Angeles Country District Attorney called “corruption on steroids.” The officials were charged with misappropriating funds from city government to the tune of $5.5 million, and garnering salaries as high $800,000, more than quadruple the California governor’s salary. In a series of trials that stretched on for more than three years, the mayor ultimately pled no contest to 69 felonies, and the trials of the various city officials have been riddled with allegations of voter fraud, extortion of local businesses, taking of illegal loans from the city, and manipulation of the pension system. Bell officials even used (and likely tampered with) a referendum to change the city’s legal structure to a chartered city which allowed them to raise their own salaries.

The United States generally experiences very low levels of corruption convictions, around 1,000 per year across the nation. One might expect that some level of state, federal, or citizen oversight would have prevented the Bell incident. Yet this massive scandal was only uncovered due to quality investigative journalism by the Los Angeles Times, and only after five full years of consistent wrongdoing by city officials. How did this happen, and how can similar misconduct be prevented in the future?

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