Tag Archives: reporting

The Coal Industry Has No “Final Villain”

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“Manchin’s coal corruption is so much worse than you knew.” So proclaimed the headline of a Rolling Stone article this past January, referring to West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. In March, the New York Times published a similar article. “At every step of his political career,” the Times reported, “Joe Manchin helped a West Virginia power plant that is the sole customer of his private coal business.” Salon, just a few days later, followed suit, describing Machin’s ties to the coal industry as a “stunning portrait of political corruption.” (See also here, here, here, and here). These stories, understandably, focus on Machin himself—the Rolling Stone article even calls him “the final villain” in the story of corruption it unfolds. And Manchin’s conduct is indeed outrageous: First as Governor and then as a Senator, Manchin lined his pockets off of personal stakes in the coal industry—an industry he used his political power to prop up at every turn—in spite of pollution, climate change, inefficiency, and high costs to his constituents.

Yet the journalistic outrage over Manchin’s unethical (albeit not illegal) behavior may be distracting from the real issue, if not outright misdiagnosing it. Corruption in the coal industry is not the result of individual unscrupulous politicians. The problem is coal itself.

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A Mandatory Reporting Requirement in Israel: Maybe Not a Lost Hope?

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In my last post, I discussed and critiqued a proposal, advanced in a policy paper published by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), for a mandatory reporting requirement in Israel’s public sector. Under the IDI paper’s proposal, a public official who, acting in his or her official capacity, formed a “substantial suspicion” that corruption has taken place or will take place could face disciplinary sanctions for failing to report this suspected corruption “as soon as possible.” I criticized this proposal on the grounds that it would both discourage reporting in those cases where a potential whistleblower is reluctant to report right away and so delays for a period of time, and would also deter employees from cooperating with investigators by sharing relevant information that they had not previously disclosed. In both of these cases—the employee who didn’t report right away but might be willing to report later, and the employee who didn’t voluntarily report but might be willing to share information when questioned by investigators—the threat of disciplinary sanctions for failure to report immediately may actually induce employees to keep silent, especially since the chances they will be caught and punished if they never reveal what they suspected are generally quite low. Instead of imposing a mandatory reporting requirement, I argued, Israel (and similarly situated countries) should strengthen positive incentives for whistleblowers, offering them more generous rewards and more effective protections against retaliation.

While many readers broadly agreed with my critique of the IDI paper’s mandatory reporting proposal in its current form, several colleagues suggested that a modified version of the mandatory reporting requirement might be effective and appropriate. In this post, I consider what seem to me the most plausible and promising revisions to the original IDI proposal, and evaluate whether these modifications would overcome my principal critiques: Continue reading →

Why Mandatory Corruption Reporting Requirements May Prove Counterproductive

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Whistleblowers who report on and expose illegal acts in their workplaces are invaluable to fighting corruption. In Israel, as I stressed in a previous post, the recognition of the importance of whistleblowers has led to the adoption of several (unsatisfactory) legal instruments which are designed to encourage whistleblowers to step forward. These instruments are mainly about rewarding or protecting those employees who have dared to report on illegalities despite the personal and professional risks associated with their coming forward. An important example of such a positive instrument is Israel’s Protection of Workers (Exposure of Offenses and of Harm to Integrity or to Proper Administration) Law,  which establishes a whistleblower-friendly mechanism for seeking damages from employers who engage in unlawful retaliation .

But some argue that positive incentives are insufficient. In 2019, the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), one of the country’s leading research institutes, published a policy paper in which the authors (Professor Mordechai Kremnitzer and Yazid Ershied) argued that negative incentives—that is, the threat of sanctions for those who fail to report corruption in their workplaces—should also be employed. More specifically, the authors propose that Israel’s disciplinary law include a provision that requires any public employee who, in his or her official capacity, has formed a “substantial suspicion” that an act of corruption has taken place to report on it “as soon as possible” to a newly established governmental unit which would address corruption in the public sector. The authors claim that adoption of such a mandatory reporting requirement, if backed by the credible threat of sanctions, would increase the number of reports by public officials who observe corruption. (The sanctions recommended by the authors would be disciplinary rather than criminal, as criminal sanctions in their view would be disproportionate and consequently ineffective.)

The IDI paper is the most thorough and impressive piece written on proposals to adopt a mandatory reporting requirement on corruption in Israel. But while the authors list some good reasons for adopting such a requirement, they fail to consider how their proposal would interact with the phenomenon of “delayed reporting.” Employees are often reluctant to report suspected corruption right away, but eventually become willing to report it. In other words, for entirely understandable reasons, it often takes whistleblowers some time and contemplation before they are finally ready to report on illegalities. When one takes this fact into account, it becomes apparent that the IDI paper’s proposed mandatory reporting requirement might prove counterproductive, for two reasons: Continue reading →

Planning and Zoning Board Corruption: Finding the Missing Whistleblowers

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My last post looked at the constant, pernicious corruption and conflict of interest in local land use planning decisions in the United States. Despite shocking stories and a handful of high-profile investigations and prosecutions (see, for example, here and here), little comprehensive work has been done to address the potential for corruption in planning and zoning decisions, even when warning signs abound. Instead, most instances of corruption in land use planning decisions remain undetected, perhaps because the seemingly small stakes make it unlikely that external investigators will scrutinize these decisions too closely.

Yet potential whistleblowers surely see or suspect bribery, conflicted dealings, or other malfeasance in land use planning. Reforms should make it easier for those individuals to come forward, as well as make it more likely that their reports will lead to action. Ideally, these measures would recognize the particular characteristics of land use decisions, such as the challenges posed by the large numbers of local officials involved in planning and zoning. Here are a few suggestions for how to encourage simpler, more consistent reporting:

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Mexico’s Corrupt Mayors: Who Gets Punished at the Ballot Box, and Why

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In a democracy, when and why are some politicians electorally punished for corrupt acts, while others get off scot-free? Some answers are commonsense: major scandals generally draw more ire than minor malfeasance; media coverage (and hence voter knowledge) matters; and citizens consider a variety of performance indicators—not just corruption or lack thereof—in selecting politicians. But the details are hazy. Some studies suggest politicians who get caught are more likely face electoral loss, but others find little to no such correlation. Likewise, we know anticorruption candidates often flounder for political reasons, but sometimes they succeed against the odds. So what drives, or contributes to, voter backlash against corrupt politicians?

A recent paper by Harvard scholars Horacio Larreguy, John Marshall, and James Snyder addresses this question in the context of mayoral elections in Mexico. Its conclusions should give pause to anticorruption activists looking for broad-brush solutions. In brief, the paper finds that the devil is in the details: local media coverage can reduce a corrupt incumbent’s vote share, but regional or national media doesn’t seem to matter much; voters do punish corrupt politicians on average, but certain political parties are punished much more than others for the same misconduct; and guaranteeing an audit of public programs reduces malfeasance, but merely threatening a possible audit has little if any effect.

These nuanced findings provide insight into voters’ habits, but they also reinforce the notion that corruption is deeply political—and therefore anticorruption interventions must be context-specific. To unpack this all a bit more, consider the study’s main findings: Continue reading →