Red tape is corruption

You’ll feel the frustration of reader Noli G. Reyes III from his letter:

"Yesterday in the news was about reducing red tape in government. It won’t work.

"Let me tell you of a recent incident, when I had to get a copy of my brother’s birth certificate. The National Statistics Office had no record. I had to go to the city hall. The first search scored negative. Only when I pointed out the registry number did they finally find the file. I had to pay a fee for it to be sent to the NSO. Is it not the city hall’s job, by standard procedure and by law, to do that without having to make the taxpayer wait in line long and pay up?

"At any rate, I got an authenticated copy of the birth certificate. At the back was an annotation by the civil registrar of a change in name, per juvenile court ruling. Now comes NSO’s turn to display red tape. The staff said I needed an endorsement from the registrar. Why, I asked, when city hall already had transmitted to them the birth document? They replied with more red tape: I was to get a copy of the court’s ruling, duly stating that it’s final. What for, I asked again, when the information already is written at the back of the birth certificate, which is on numbered security paper? I realized later that the answer was that so I would pay more fees."

Everyday millions of taxpayers go through the same wringer Noli did. Agencies lay down innumerable rules ostensibly to prevent corruption. But those very rules give rise to red tape. And red tape, in turn, encourages corruption. The fees, recently doubled or tripled depending on the agency, only magnify the problem.

Take the case of the Land Transportation Office. There’s a relatively new requirement of drug testing prior to renewal of a driver’s license. Fine. But the tests are so cumbersome. Too, the LTO lines can be so long because of the many transaction stages: filing, waiting, photography, waiting again, signature, waiting some more, payment, and finally release of the license. The rigmarole takes half a day. So much so that a businessman, take note of the root busy + ness, would readily take up a fixer’s offer to speed things up – for a fee under the table, of course. The shortcut begins with a no-show at the drug-testing clinic. Meaning, the results would be manufactured and the paying businessman naturally free of traces of any narcotic in his urine. Then, he just sits nearby as the fixer moves his papers through the clerks, cashiers and signatories. They snappily accommodate the fixer, forgetting the long lines in front of them, because of their cuts from the "fee".

There are no bribees where there are no bribers, they say. But the businessman justifies his bribe giving with the thought that he has to get to work fast, be productive, and earn a profit from which the government takes its share in taxes. The LTO men justify the bribe taking with the thought that they didn’t steal what was due the government anyway. They still collected the right amount, only recently increased three-fold, from the businessmen. All they did was collect a few hundred pesos more for an unofficial "express lane".

That’s silly reasoning. The burden of keeping the government clean lies with the public servant, not the taxpayer. The Constitution holds that "public office is a public trust." Therefore, "public officers and employees must at all times be accountable to the people, serve them with utmost responsibility, integrity, loyalty, and efficiency, act with patriotism and justice, and lead modest lives."

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It’s a warlike world and everyone’s gotten used to it. So why a selling frenzy at the Manila stock market Monday, when news spread about North Korea’s nuclear bomb tests?

An analyst opines that the war jitters just moved closer to home from faraway Iraq and Lebanon. The worry, he says, is that George Bush might send American troops to Pyongyang the way he did to Baghdad in search of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction). US troops have not found any from Saddam Hussein, but will certainly have some to confiscate from Kim Jong-Il.

Will the selling frenzy end? Yes, the analyst predicts, as soon as stock players realize that war is inevitable anyway, so might as well trade.

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Clarifications, corrections: In hailing the launch of an Internet portal of the trade department’s One Town One Product project, I missed the Web addie. Just key in www.otopphilippines.gov.ph to search for any town’s ware, check related sites, or contact the makers.

Last week I recounted that the Philippine Assembly (lower house) of 1908 allocated $17,000 for Manuel Quezon to attend a conference in Russia. The site was St. Petersburg, not Moscow. Such overspending by our early legislators are immortalized in the "Journal of the Philippine Commission", not Bernardita Reyes Churchill’s "Philippine Independence Missions". Thanks to Henry Ma of the Asian Development Bank for pointing it out.

Also last week I wrote about the theft by police officers of shabu from the evidence warehouse of the Phil. Drug Enforcement Agency. To which, a reader reacted by way of suggestion to the authorities:

"How can we store shabu evidence for purposes of judicial trial but be worthless to steal? In the presence of judiciary officials, mix the shabu with a thermosetting polyester resin. This resin, used for fiberglass and synthetic lavatories, is readily available locally. Just mix one kilo of resin, P110 only, to every four kilos of shabu. Thieves will lose interest because the shabu will turn solid as a rock, no longer sellable to addicts looking for the whiter powder. And yet the stock will always be available for judicial purposes. Please do not mention my name, so I can avoid repercussions."

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