How not to control corruption
In the process of working on a project, I came across a reference to a book that seemed interesting. The book The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity: How Corruption Control makes Government Ineffective was written in the nineties by Frank Anechiarico and James B Jacobs. We could not procure it in India and so bought it from the US. I wanted to read it because the title intrigued me and it seemed to resonate with some of my own experiences in my career in the public service spanning nearly half a century.
The book related entirely to the US and, more specifically, to the governance of New York. It does not make for easy reading, crammed as it is with facts and figures and written in the pedantic style of true scholars. It talks about the evolution of corruption and the changing forms of measures to control it, a goal never achieved. Every now and again, a scandal would surface and there would be a spurt of activity, followed by a period of inaction. In fact, looking at any country, including ours, there is a wave-like structure in corruption and anti-corruption measures. The Lokpal is a living example. It erupts periodically, then subsides.
The net result of every anti-corruption crusade is the creation of more institutions, more bureaucratic structures and more laws and regulations. In 1983, a Talent Bank was created by the Mayor in the city of New York, primarily to bring more women and minorities into the city administration. In the words of the authors, it got “transformed from an affirmative action job bank into a patronage mill”, “a conduit for patronage in an administration that publicly shunned patronage politics”. This dichotomy between public positions and what happens in practice is something we Indians have been used to for years. It’s not just India, corruption prevails in every other country, including non-democratic, highly regimented ones.
To strike a balance between efficiency in administration and concern with corruption is one of the greatest challenges of governance. The authors speak at length on whistleblowers. This institution, with its protective legal framework, was created to bring to public attention hidden acts of malfeasance on the part of administrations. However, it can easily turn into a destructive weapon that paralyses administration.
As the US Comptroller General’s report to a House Subcommittee on Civil Service put it, “The Congress must also weigh the objective of stronger protection for whistleblower disclosures against the objectives of management authority and accountability. Unrestrained whistleblowing could raise levels of dissidence and insubordination to the point where efficiency could be affected.”
The authors point out many cases in the New York administration in which indiscipline, mismanagement and even downright malpractice went unpunished for long stretches of time because the perpetrators turned into whistleblowers, creating stress and fear within the system. While whistleblowers do have a legitimate role in governance and must be protected from reprisals, it is necessary also to distinguish clearly between genuine whistleblowers and others who attempt to conceal their own shortcomings, failures and malpractices by masquerading as whistleblowers.
The administration has to be strong and effective to deal with such pretenders to ensure that chaos is not created within the system. A similar dilemma exists in respect to investigations. Here, the problem is one of distinguishing between a genuine mistake made by the official and deliberate mischief aimed at personal gain. The authors talk of a commissioner in the administration of Mayor Koch in New York, who said that the worst part of the job was the fear that the Department of Investigation would one day start questioning him about a matter “that, on a busy day, had escaped her attention”.
The same fear prevails across sections of the administration in our country. So, decisions which should be taken and which would benefit the organisation and the people, get inordinately delayed. It is very easy to push a file from one desk to the other, to form committee after committee to create many layers of protection around the individual. In the process, the citizen suffers in silence.
The situation gets more complicated when an auditor enters the picture. The auditor starts from a position of advantage. He enters the scene long after the event after it is clear whether the assumptions made were right or wrong. He has access to all information on the subject. The administrator, when he takes the original decision, would not have with him all the facts or the outcome his decision will ultimately have. The auditor also does not have adequate technical knowledge or experience relating to the matter under audit.
The objective is to find fault and, hence, he contributes heavily to the proliferation of bureaucratic inaction. The authors, quoting the National Academy of Administration (1983) point to the proliferation of laws and regulations that have taken place as a consequence of attempts to cover each issue that can be subjected to auditing. In the words of the Academy, “ The panel believes that the accumulation of such protection has, in total, become excessive and has often been represented as the answer to poor management in situations where the emphasis should more realistically have been placed on strengthening management.”
The object of the book is defined in the preface. It provides a “skeptical assessment” of the effects of anti-corruption efforts”. It doesn’t trivialise the problem of corruption. “We merely recognise what many students of corruption and white collar crime have previously pointed out: that even the strongest enforcement efforts in these areas do not fulfil their goals,” say the authors.
K m Chandrasekhar
Former Cabinet Secretary
Email: kmchandrasekhar@gmail.com