Prevention

There were no surprises in the freshly released results of a region-wide perception survey on corruption incidence undertaken by the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC).

The Philippines ranked with the second worst corruption profile after Indonesia. For several years now, we have consistently ranked second and Indonesia first.

It is either that both our countries have not been doing enough to curb the culture of corruption or that all our other neighbors are attending to reforms that bring down the volume of corruption at a consistently faster rate than we both do.

We have an unduly developed propensity to play down assessments such as this one when they are adverse. We are probably the only country that makes a diplomatic issue of travel advisories issued by foreign governments to their nationals.

The effort to play down the PERC perception of corruption survey the past few days worked on two basic themes. Both of them ridiculous.

The first theme says that the PERC instrument is a mere perception survey and is, therefore, not reflective of reality.

All instruments used to gauge incidence of corruption are perception surveys. This is because there is really no other way to fully document and accurately quantify corruption incidence. Unlike ordinary polls that seek out the opinions of poorly informed man-on-the-street respondents, the PERC poll interviews business executives: those who should know, more than anybody else, the extent to which corruption creates unwarranted costs to doing business in a particular country.

The second theme played out by the spinners who want to play down the corruption report says that the results reported out will have no effect on investor confidence.

This is an outright lie. In a competitive global market, corporate decision-makers rely on reports such as those put out by PERC in figuring out where to do business. PERC, as a business itself, relies on subscriptions from corporate decision-makers to do what it does.

It might be more accurate to say that the latest report will not affect those companies that have already invested here, having discounted the increased cost of doing business due to friction caused by corruption, among other things.

Rather than try frantically to parry adverse assessments of our situation, our energies might be better spent if we tried to imagine what else we could do to diminish the perception that we are a society thoroughly crippled by corruption.

We have had a few high-profile initiatives lately. We signed on to the UN convention against corrupt practices. We have instituted lifestyle checks and passed an attrition law tailored to kick out underperforming personnel of our major revenue agencies.

An enlarged staff of lawyers at the Ombudsman’s office will ensure more competent prosecution of undesirable public officials. Civil society and private businesses have been involved in an organized effort to curb corrupt practices.

Much of the effort, however, has been directed at penalizing corrupt practices. That, no doubt, must be done. But approximately the same effort must be done to prevent corruption from happening.

This is the less mediagenic, more contentious part of the task. It is laborious, necessitates long study and careful but sustained execution, and does not create blaring headlines.

Raids, arrests and exposes produce headlines that in turn improve the political standing of those responsible for them. Re-engineering our processes are long, tedious and often anonymous processes. But they make for lasting results.

Sure, we need to upgrade our civic culture, indoctrinate our children in civic morality and continue preaching the faith of good government to all citizens. But we must also reduce the margin of bureaucratic whim, simplify our procedures so that civil servants cannot leverage for a bribe by deliberately slowing down processing and make all procurement accessible digitally so that every citizen can examine every transaction.

The Procurement Reform Act is an excellent example of process-reform. The new procurement procedures will be even more resistant to corruption when all transactions are posted on a website for all to scan.

Reforming our bureaucratic apparatuses is the toughest part of the reform process.

Militant unions in the public sector have resisted reforms and fought back rationalization of our procedures. We are beginning from an overpopulated bureaucracy. When we computerize and simplify procedures, modernize our processes, this will result in reducing the size of the bureaucracy and shifting the manpower requirement to higher-end jobs that require new skills that existing civil servants might not possess.

We must understand that an overpopulated bureaucracy invariably becomes cumbersome in its effort to keep redundant jobs in its fold. A cumbersome bureaucracy becomes prone to graft.

Furthermore, the waste resulting from redundancy is nearly as bad as the corruption that happens.

If we really want to show that we mean business in cleaning up our public sector, the administration must begin designing a comprehensive program of bureaucratic reform. This is not going to be easy, considering that reorganizing the bureaucracy requires an act of Congress.

Once the legislative deliberations begin on reorganizing the bureaucracy, a multitude of vested interests will begin exerting pressure on the legislators. The legislators will start bargaining with agencies, exacting concessions in order to save agencies that might have lost their utility in exchange for the usual bureaucratic favors granted politicians.

But we must try and initiate the process anyway – even if this means running against the odds of counter-forces resisting it every step of the way.