Fight Corruption

Peruntukan ADUN Kampung Tunku (BN) Jan 2008 hingga Mac 2008

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Corruption Perceptions Index

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Since 1995, Transparency International has published an annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) ordering the countries of the world according to "the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians". The organization defines corruption as "the abuse of entrusted power for private gain".

Conditions favorable for corruption

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Some argue that the following conditions are favorable for corruption:

Information deficits

Lack of government transparency.
Lacking freedom of information legislation. The Indian Right to Information Act 2005 has "already engendered mass movements in the country that is bringing the lethargic, often corrupt bureaucracy to its knees and changing power equations completely."
Lack of investigative reporting in the local media.
Contempt for or negligence of exercising freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Weak accounting practices, including lack of timely financial management.
Lack of measurement of corruption. For example, using regular surveys of households and businesses in order to quantify the degree of perception of corruption in different parts of a nation or in different government institutions may increase awareness of corruption and create pressure to combat it. This will also enable an evaluation of the officials who are fighting corruption and the methods used.
Tax havens which tax their own citizens and companies but not those from other nations and refuse to disclose information necessary for foreign taxation. This enables large scale political corruption in the foreign nations.

Lacking control of the government.

Democracy absent or dysfunctional. See illiberal democracy.
Lacking civic society and non-governmental organizations which monitor the government.
An individual voter may have a rational ignorance regarding politics, especially in nationwide elections, since each vote has little weight.
Weak civil service, and slow pace of reform.
Weak rule of law.
Weak legal profession.
Weak judicial independence.
Lacking protection of whistleblowers.
Lack of benchmarking, that is continual detailed evaluation of procedures and comparison to others who do similar things, in the same government or others, in particular comparison to those who do the best work. The Peruvian organization Ciudadanos al Dia has started to measure and compare transparency, costs, and efficiency in different government departments in Peru. It annually awards the best practices which has received widespread media attention. This has created competition among government agencies in order to improve.

Opportunities and incentives

Individual officials routinely handle cash, instead of handling payments by giro or on a separate cash desk — illegitimate withdrawals from supervised bank accounts are much more difficult to conceal.
Public funds are centralized rather than distributed. For example, if $1,000 is embezzled from local agency that has $2,000 funds, it easier to notice than from national agency with $2,000,000 funds. See the principle of subsidiarity.
Large, unsupervised public investments.
Sale of state-owned property and privatization.
Poorly-paid government officials.
Government licenses needed to conduct business, e.g., import licenses, encourage bribing and kickbacks.
Long-time work in the same position may create relationships inside and outside the government which encourage and help conceal corruption and favoritism. Rotating government officials to different positions and geographic areas may help prevent this.
Costly political campaigns, with expenses exceeding normal sources of political funding.
Less interaction with officials reduces the opportunities for corruption. For example, using the Internet for sending in required information, like applications and tax forms, and then processing this with automated computer systems. This may also speed up the processing and reduce unintentional human errors. See e-Government.
A windfall from exporting abundant natural resources may encourage corruption.
War and other forms of conflict correlate with a breakdown of public security.

Social conditions

Self-interested closed cliques and "old boy networks".
Family-, and clan-centered social structure, with a tradition of nepotism/favouritism being acceptable.
A gift economy, such as the Chinese guanxi or the Soviet blat system, emerges in a Communist centrally planned economy.
In societies where personal integrity is rated as less important than other characteristics (by contrast, in societies such as 18th and 19th century England, 20th century Japan and post-war western Germany, where society showed almost obsessive regard for "honor" and personal integrity, corruption was less frequently seen)
Lacking literacy and education among the population.
Frequent discrimination and bullying among the population.
Tribal solidarity, giving benefits to certain ethnic groups
Fewer women in power.

Types of corruption

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Bribery

Bribery requires two participants: one to give the bribe, and one to take it. In some countries the culture of corruption extends to every aspect of public life, making it extremely difficult for individuals to stay in business without resorting to bribes. Bribes may be demanded in order for an official to do something he is already paid to do. They may also be demanded in order to bypass laws and regulations. In some developing nations, up to half of the population has paid bribes during the past 12 months.

Graft

While bribery includes an intent to influence or be influenced by another for personal gain, which is often difficult to prove, graft only requires that the official gains something of value, not part of his official pay, when doing his work. Large "gifts" qualify as graft, and most countries have laws against it. (For example, any gift over $200 value made to the President of the United States is considered to be a gift to the Office of the Presidency and not to the President himself. The outgoing President must buy it if he or she wants to keep it.) Another example of graft is a politician using his knowledge of zoning to purchase land which he knows is planned for development, before this is publicly known, and then selling it at a significant profit. This is comparable to insider trading in business.

Patronage

Patronage refers to favoring supporters, for example with government employment. This may be legitimate, as when a newly elected government changes the top officials in the administration in order to effectively implement its policy. It can be seen as corruption if this means that incompetent persons, as a payment for supporting the regime, are selected before more able ones. In nondemocracies many government officials are often selected for loyalty rather than ability. They may be almost exclusively selected from a particular group (for example, Sunni Arabs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union, or the Junkers in Imperial Germany) that support the regime in return for such favors.

Nepotism and cronyism

Favoring relatives (nepotism) or personal friends (cronyism) is a form of illegitimate private gain. This may be combined with bribery, for example demanding that a business should employ a relative of an official controlling regulations affecting the business. The most extreme example is when the entire state is inherited, as in North Korea or Syria. A milder form of cronyism is an "old boy network", in which appointees to official positions are selected only from a closed and exclusive social network – such as the alumni of particular universities – instead of appointing the most competent candidate.

Seeking to harm enemies becomes corruption when official powers are illegitimately used as means to this end. For example, trumped-up charges are often brought up against journalists or writers who bring up politically sensitive issues, such as a politician's acceptance of bribes.

Embezzlement

Embezzlement is outright theft of entrusted funds. It is a misappropriation of property.

Another common type of embezzlement is that of entrusted government resources; for example, when a director of a public enterprise employs company workers to build or renovate his own house.

Kickbacks

A kickback is an official's share of misappropriated funds allocated from his or her organization to an organization involved in corrupt bidding. For example, suppose that a politician is in charge of choosing how to spend some public funds. He can give a contract to a company that is not the best bidder, or allocate more than they deserve. In this case, the company benefits, and in exchange for betraying the public, the official receives a kickback payment, which is a portion of the sum the company received. This sum itself may be all or a portion of the difference between the actual (inflated) payment to the company and the (lower) market-based price that would have been paid had the bidding been competitive. Kickbacks are not limited to government officials; any situation in which people are entrusted to spend funds that do not belong to them are susceptible to this kind of corruption.

Unholy alliance

An unholy alliance is a coalition among seemingly antagonistic groups, especially if one is religious,[7] for ad hoc or hidden gain. Like patronage, unholy alliances are not necessarily illegal, but unlike patronage, by its deceptive nature and often great financial resources, an unholy alliance can be much more dangerous to the public interest. An early, well-known use of the term was by Theodore Roosevelt (TR):

"To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." - 1912 Progressive Party Platform, attributed to TR[8] and quoted again in his autobiography[9] where he connects trusts and monopolies (sugar interests, Standard Oil, etc.) to Woodrow Wilson, Howard Taft, and consequently both major political parties.

Involvement in organized crime

An illustrative example of official involvement in organized crime can be found from 1920s and 1930s Shanghai, where Huang Jinrong was a police chief in the French concession, while simultaneously being a gang boss and co-operating with Du Yuesheng, the local gang ringleader. The relationship kept the flow of profits from the gang's gambling dens, prostitution, and protection rackets undisturbed.

The United States accused Manuel Noriega's government in Panama of being a "narcokleptocracy", a corrupt government profiting on illegal drug trade. Later the U.S. invaded Panama and captured Noriega.

Political Corruption

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From Wikipedia

Political corruption is the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Neither are illegal acts by private persons or corporations not directly involved with the government. An illegal act by an officeholder constitutes political corruption only if the act is directly related to their official duties.