Tag Archives: United States

Part-time Legislatures Should Use Disclosure, Not Recusal, To Regulate Conflicts of Interest

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For most state legislators in the United States, public service is a part-time gig; forty U.S. states have part-time or hybrid legislatures. These part-time state lawmakers have regular jobs, and while some are conventional—law or business—some are less so. (There’s the pizza delivery guy in Arkansas, the boxing and mixed martial arts judge in Nevada, the hula dancer in Hawaii, and the alligator hunter in Louisiana.) Part-time legislatures are popular because they’re cheap—New Hampshire pays its legislators just $100 per year—and also because of distrust of professional politicians and a romantic notion that the legislature should instead be a forum for citizens of varied professional backgrounds to bring their unique perspective to the lawmaking process.

But part-time legislatures also entail significant corruption risks for three reasons. First, when legislators have private sector jobs, it may be easier for them to conceal bribe payments as legitimate outside income. Second, part-time legislators’ low public salaries may make them more inclined to accept bribes or otherwise abuse their office than better-paid full-time legislators. These two factors have been discussed previously on this blog. Here, I want to consider a third factor: the potential conflicts of interest between an official’s public and private work.

A part-time legislator’s dual responsibilities will often, perhaps inevitably, conflict. Teachers will vote on education issues, doctors on health care bills, and business owners on tax plans. Lawyers, lobbyists, and insurance agents may vote on legislation that directly affects their clients. Part-time legislators may even introduce bills advancing their private professional interests. Take the Missouri legislator who introduced and secured passage of a bill prohibiting cities from banning plastic bags at grocery stores—and who also happened to be the director of the Missouri Grocers Association. Similarly egregious, lawyers serving as part-time legislators have sponsored bills raising the salaries or pensions of judges before whom they had cases. One might worry too that part-time legislators, especially those who are lawyers or lobbyists, will implicitly or explicitly use their public positions as a way to drum up business, precisely because potential clients might think that hiring a part-time legislator will increase the odds of favorable legislative treatment. And even if a part-time legislator is not influenced in the slightest by her private professional interests, conflicts like those just described still risk creating the appearance of corruption. What can be done about this?

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Is the U.S. Political System Characterized by “Legalized Corruption”? Some Tentative Concerns About a Common Rhetorical Strategy

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Today is Election Day in the United States. It’s an important election (they all are, really), and I hope those of our readers who are eligible to vote in the United States will do so. But this post isn’t going to be about these U.S. elections specifically. Rather, I want to consider a question about the U.S. electoral system more generally: Is it accurate to describe the U.S. system as a one of “legalized corruption”? That is, do the campaign finance and lobbying rules in the United States amount to a system in which wealthy individuals and interest groups “purchase” favorable policy through what are effectively “bribes”—in the form of campaign contributions or support?

The use of the rhetoric of corruption and “legalized bribery” to describe the U.S. political system has been around for a while, and it seems to have become even more pronounced over the last few election cycles—perhaps galvanized by the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial decision in the Citizens United case. (For examples, see here, here, here, and here.) I certainly understand, and indeed share, the underlying concerns about how the influence of concentrated economic wealth can distort the political process and tilt policy outcomes in a direction that favors the affluent. Yet I’ve felt increasingly ambivalent about the use of the language of “systemic corruption” or “legalized bribery” to describe the very real money-in-politics problem in the United States. There are three main reasons for my ambivalence. Continue reading →

What Would Senator Warren’s Anticorruption Bill Really Mean for Advocacy Groups? 

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Last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced her Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, a 300-page blueprint for how to counter the structural enablers of public corruption in the United States. Included among her many proposals (which are detailed at length here) is a set of new lobbying regulations. Many civil society groups—most notably Oxfam—have praised the bill for bringing “an end to lobbying as we know it.” This enthusiasm is understandable, as few professions are decried with the special fervor Americans reserve for lobbyists. The very word conjures up images of slick, well-heeled, sleazy political operators who manipulate and corrupt the political system for their corporate clients. But of course lobbyists are a much more diverse group. Some lobbyists work for big pharma, banks, or the gun industry, but others work for the girl scouts, the environment, or the poor. Indeed, some work within anticorruption organizations. And so while there are many things to like about Senator Warren’s bill, including many of the proposed new lobbying regulations, it’s a bit odd that none of the anticorruption organizations that have praised the bill (see, for example, here and here) appear to have acknowledged (at least publicly) how the bill’s lobbying restrictions would affect their own work.

With that in mind, there are at least four aspects of the Warren bill that should concern anticorruption groups and other civil society advocacy organizations:

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Guest Post: Toward Global Standards for Defense Sector Governance

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Amira El-Sayed, Program Manager for Transparency International’s Responsible Defence Governance program, contributes today’s guest post:

The governance of military power presents one of the great global challenges of our age. The defense sector is large, powerful, and secretive, and for those reasons especially vulnerable to corruption. In many countries, small groups of elites divert defense resources for personal enrichment, which can create risks to a state’s stability and security. Perhaps ever more troubling, in many countries powerful militaries run vast and secretive business empires exempt from oversight. Some of these businesses, such as resource extraction, are nominally legal, but militaries are often enmeshed with illegal activities like the trafficking of drugs, arms, and people. This too threatens state security, in at least two ways. First, poorly governed, corrupt militaries may be unable to respond effectively to genuine national security threats. Second, when the military uses its power to secure economic advantages for elites, this may contribute to the public resentment and frustration that can fuel violent extremist movements.

Improving governance in the defense sector is especially challenging. Defense sectors have historically hidden behind an “exceptional” status that has been used to stymie governance reform, with “national security” invoked as a sweeping justification to evade legitimate scrutiny from independent institutions and experts, such as auditors, anticorruption institutions, and civil society organizations. And this is not just an issue in authoritarian states: even in democracies, militaries are often exempted from meaningful oversight by parliamentary committees, judiciaries, audit offices, and anticorruption bodies, even as oversight by those bodies expands in other areas. While the need for secrecy may well be more pressing with respect to certain aspects of military and defense policy, the exemption of the defense sector from meaningful scrutiny is often overbroad, unjustified, and used to mask corruption, misuse of resources, and incompetence.

So how do you address one of the most complex challenges in governance, in a sector that has been exceptionally secretive, opaque, and impenetrable? Some of the work has to be done at the national level in individual countries, tailored to the each country’s specific circumstances. (There are many examples of such work by Transparency International (TI) and other civil society organizations. For instance, in Ukraine TI worked to establish high-level defense anticorruption committee called NAKO, and in Nigeria TI worked with the Air Force to take examine its governance structures and anticorruption systems.) But what about global standards, along the lines of what has been developed in other areas, like human rights and labor? Here there appears to be a significant gap. True, some security-related instruments do provide some principles for state/military behavior in specific areas, such as the OCSE Code of Conduct, UN Arms Trade Treaty, the NATO Building Integrity Programme, and the Tshwane Principles. And some of the general anticorruption or governance-related instruments, such as the UN Convention Against Corruption and Open Government Partnership, have some limited applications to the defense sector. But none of these instruments offers a comprehensive global approach to defense governance.

To fill this gap, TI is launching an initiative to formulate, formalize, and promote a set of global principles that underpin responsible, accountable governance of military power—principles that would embrace the idea that the military must be accountable to the people and that would, if followed, improve domestic governance of the defense sector. That is, TI is working with national governments, other civil society organizations, and the international community to develop Global Standards for Responsible Defense Governance, embodied in a Declaration on the Responsible Governance of Military Power. Continue reading →

Is the West Being Too Critical of Corruption in Ukraine? The Debate Continues

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A couple weeks back I posted a commentary on an interesting debate over the West’s approach to promoting anticorruption in Ukraine. On the one side, Adrian Karatnycky (the Managing Partner of a consulting firm that assists international clients with government relations in Ukraine) and Alexander Motyl (Professor of Political Science at Rutgers) published a piece arguing that the West’s approach to promoting anticorruption was misguided, for two reasons: First, because (according to the authors) there was too much focus on punishing individual wrongdoers rather than on institutional reform, and second because the emphasis on the failings of the Ukrainian government (and the wrongdoing of individual Ukrainian officials) was undermining a reformist government, and would likely lead Ukrainian voters to embrace populist demagogues. On the other side, Daria Kaleniuk (the executive director of a Ukrainian civil society organization called the Anti-Corruption Action Center) countered that the only reason the Ukrainian government has made any progress on anticorruption reforms is because of pressure from the West, and that holding individual wrongdoers accountable is essential to making progress on this issue and restoring the faith of the Ukrainian people in the institutions of government.

My own take was that Ms. Kaleniuk is likely correct that individual accountability, though not sufficient, is a necessary component of an effective anticorruption strategy; Karatnycky and Motyl’s implicit argument that Ukraine could make headway on the corruption problem without an effective system for holding individual wrongdoers accountable, as long as the country pursues “institutional reforms” (like privatization and de-monopolization), struck me as both facially implausible and inconsistent with what we know about successful anticorruption reforms elsewhere. Karatnycky and Motyl’s second point, about “messaging,” struck me as harder. On the one hand, it’s true that emphasizing only problems and failures and shortcomings might breed cynicism, frustration, and possibly political instability. But on the other hand, exposing corruption may be the only way (or at least the most effective way) to mobilize public opinion to address some very real problems.

I probably wouldn’t have returned to this topic (about which, I can’t repeat enough, I lack genuine expertise), but Mr. Karatnycky and Professor Motyl published a rejoinder to Ms. Kaleniuk last week that I think merits further commentary. The new piece makes a number of separate points, and I won’t touch on all of them. But if I had to sum up their central argument, it would go like this:

Don’t be too critical of the ruling elites—even if those elites are pretty corrupt, and even if the only reason they’ve done much of anything about corruption in the past is because they’ve been pressured or shamed or coerced into doing so. If you’re too mean to them, they might lose the support of the people—and what comes next might be much worse.

That summary, which I admit is a bit of a caricature, might seem unfair. But I don’t think it is. Indeed, I not only think it’s an accurate distillation of Karatnycky and Motyl’s main argument, but I actually think that it’s an argument worth taking seriously, and in some circumstances might even be right. But I’m skeptical it’s right in most cases, and I remain to be convinced that it’s right about Ukraine. Under most conditions, I think it’s probably wrongheaded and dangerous to say that we shouldn’t criticize a government for failing to tackle corruption or try to expose the corruption of individual politicians out of a concern that doing so might undermine the legitimacy of the government.

So, before I proceed, let me make clear that my caricature—“Don’t say mean things about the kinda-corrupt-but-kinda-reformist incumbents”—really is a fair distillation of the argument. Here the key passages from Karatnycky and Motyl’s most recent piece: Continue reading →

Congress Should Act to Make US Aid to Ukraine Contingent on Anticorruption Reform

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Since the Maidan Revolution removed former President Yanukovych from power in 2014, anticorruption progress in Ukraine has been uneven at best. Ukraine passed important anticorruption legislation in 2015, yet implementing it has been a challenge. Progress in some areas, including the judiciary and prosecutors’ offices, have met with significant and growing resistance. Many reformers within the government have resigned. For what it’s worth, Ukraine’s Corruption Perceptions Index score has only marginally improved. Still, there has been some progress. A significant portion of Ukraine’s budget is comprised of foreign aid, and donors—who have little patience for having their money stolen or wasted—have pressed the Ukrainian government to take the fight against corruption more seriously. The biggest anticorruption reforms have therefore been the ones on which large donors made their aid contingent.

The United States is one of the most important of these donors. The U.S. sends billions in loan guarantees, military aid, development aid, and State Department spending to Ukraine. During the Obama administration, anticorruption, and political reform more generally, was a high priority for the U.S. in its relationship with the post-Maidan Ukrainian government. Former Vice President Biden emphasized anticorruption during his five visits to Ukraine, and put personal pressure on President Poroshenko to follow through on his commitments in that area. Biden also played a role in delaying one billion dollars in loan guarantees to Ukraine due to corruption concerns—an approach the IMF has also embraced. But the anticorruption strings that the U.S. had attached to foreign aid in the past were imposed as a matter of executive discretion rather than legislative obligation.

Under the Trump administration, perhaps unsurprisingly, ensuring that Ukraine follows through on its anticorruption reforms has not been a foreign policy priority. No highly visible person in the current administration has taken on Biden’s conspicuous role in ensuring Kyiv follows through on its Minsk commitments. If President Trump isn’t willing to use U.S. leverage to continue to push for anticorruption efforts in Ukraine, the U.S. Congress can and should step in by putting anticorruption conditions on at least some American spending in Ukraine.  Continue reading →

The Debate Over Public UBO Registries Continues: A Response to Kenney and Cook

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As our regular readers know, over the past few weeks GAB has had the opportunity to host on what is shaping up to be a lively and interesting debate over the advantages and disadvantages of creating public registries of the ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) of companies and other legal entities. A UBO, for those not familiar with the lingo, is the real-live flesh-and-blood human being who has a sufficiently strong direct or indirect ownership interest in a company to be considered the “true” owner. Increasing UBO transparency is a top priority for many civil society activists, who argue that anonymous company ownership facilitates grand corruption, as well as money laundering, tax evasion, and other harmful activities. In many jurisdictions, UBO information is not available, and even law enforcement may have difficulty determining a company’s true owners. In other jurisdictions, companies must submit and update validated UBO information to the authorities, but that information is confidential, available only to law enforcement or other regulatory agencies in the context of an investigation, or perhaps to others in a limited set of circumstances (for example, banks performing customer due diligence). Most anticorruption advocates, as well as law enforcement agencies and most experts, agree that a confidential UBO registry is far superior to having no registry at all. The harder question, and the one we’ve been debating here at GAB, concerns whether the UBO registry should be public, so that anyone—not just law enforcement agencies acting pursuant to an investigation—can examine the registry to see who owns what.

The most recent round of discussion and debate was triggered when the UK—one of the few major economies that has implemented a public UBO registry—decided to require the 14 British Overseas Territories, such as the British Virgin Islands (BVI)—to create and maintain public UBO registries. Many in the civil society community celebrated this as a huge triumph, but others denounced the UK’s decision. The denunciation that got the debate going over here at GAB was a provocative piece by Martin Kenney, a BVI asset recovery lawyer, on the FCPA Blog. Mr. Kenney’s piece prompted replies from GAB Senior Contributor Rick Messick (here) and from me (here). Then last week, we were able to publish two more pieces, one from Mr. Kenney and another from Geoff Cook (the CEO of Jersey Finance). Both Mr. Kenney and Mr. Cook took issue with some or all of the arguments that Rick and I advanced, and pressed the claim that the UK’s imposition of public UBO registries on the Overseas Territories was a bad mistake.

Both of their pieces raise important points that deserve a reply. For that reason, and because I think that this issue is important enough that continuing this exchange on GAB for another round or two may be worthwhile for our readership, in this post I’m going to offer a response to Mr. Kenney’s and Mr. Cook’s posts. To lead with the conclusion: While I respect their experience and expertise in these matters, I found most of their arguments unconvincing, or at the very least in need of further explanation before I’m ready to reconsider my (admittedly tentative) view that public UBO registries have sufficient advantages over confidential UBO registries that moving from the latter to the former is desirable. Continue reading →