Day 1
Wildchild
5.55curbingcorruptioningovernment2.pptxPublic and Nonprofit Management: Curbing Corruption, Enhancing Efficiency
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A Chain Is As Strong As It’s Weakest Link
Behind The Mask Of Our Governance
Public and nonprofit management is the development or application of methodical and systematic techniques that are designed
to analyze and make the operations of governments and public-service nonprofit organizations more efficient and effective.
The majority of public management’s key methods was initially established, in large part and occasionally in whole part, as
a reaction to corrupt governance, and each still is used to curb it.
Corruption’s causes are structural, cultural, and, of course, personal.
Corruption’s Causes
Governmental Structure and Graft
A large number of administrative units in a country lowers corruption. Illegal, tax-evading, “shadow economy is smaller in federal countries than in unitary states, although an increase in the income tax rate will unambiguously increase the taxpayer’s level of evasion.
Fiscal decentralization, a corollary of federal systems, also appears to reduce corruption in countries, even in those that are highly politicized.5
Culture and Corruption
National cultures that are poor and rural, and which have centralized governments, politically disengaged citizenries, a repressed press, citizens who are distrusting of each other, greater regulatory activity, and poorly paid public officials associate with high rates of corruption.
Note: An agency’s culture also can encourage graft when: there is no “clear integrity policy”; colleagues are loyal to one another; and supervision is too lax or too oppressive.
The Corrupt Public Official
Money is the leading reason why public officials become corrupt followed closely by love, friendship, and status.
Corrupt officials often have domineering personalities, are popular, and are viewed as effective, characteristics that give them “space to maneuver.”
In fact, large physical spaces, such as disproportionately big desks, can cause the people occupying them to feel “more powerful,” which, in turn, leads to “increases in dishonest behavior.”
They slowly “‘slide down’ toward corruption” and maintain “a long, institutionalized relationship” with their corruptors.
Corrupt officials rarely think of themselves as corrupt,
even though they commit multiple corrupt acts.
Lord Acton’s famous phrase, uttered in 1887, that, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is not really accurate.
Gaining power merely reveals its owner’s already-existing character, for good or ill.
Note: Moral power holders do not misuse their power, but less moral ones do.
Why Does Corruption Endure?
The continuance of those governmental and cultural conditions that produce corruption also ensure its persistence.
It appears that the more centralized the government, the more “fused” that political power is within it,
and the less access that the press has to the government,
Democracies are largely free of these conditions, and the more vibrant the democracy—that is, large numbers of citizens voting regularly in competitive elections—
the more honest the government.
By contrast, in democracies where there is low voter turnout corruption often
is deeply entrenched.
Regrettably, some voters prefer corrupt democracies to honest ones. In democratic jurisdictions, graft often associates with reduced public spending.
If citizens’ demands for services are “relatively elastic,” then this association sometimes leads to lower taxes.
“Under this condition,” some citizens who favor low taxes may “hold their noses and vote” for continued corruption.
Fraud in the Independent Sector
There are three kinds of corruption in the independent sector:
nonprofit organizations that defraud governments,
or defraud their donors,
and nonprofit employees who defraud their organizations.
Confronting Corruption In American
What is the extent of political graft in the United States,
and what is being done about it?
Annually, fewer than 3,000 public officials and “others involved” are charged, convicted, or awaiting trial for public corruption.
The leading charges are
theft and bribery in programs involving federal funds;
high ranking or elected officials are found in only 2 percent of these corruption cases, and most cases involve low-ranking federal or local officials. Happily, overall corruption is in decline.
Typically, from more than 300 to over 400 of these prosecutions involve federal officials in any given year.
American Cultural and Structural Inhibitors
Cultural Inhibitors American culture, with its premium on openness and access discourages corruption.
Relative to large power distance cultures, open and accessible countries “have a very high proportion” of public employees who report unethical or illegal conduct in their agencies;
Structural Inhibitors Americans enjoy a relatively prosperous economy; live mostly in urban areas; and their governments are bombarded unrelentingly by a robust, sometimes rabid, press. These factors inhibit corruption.
In addition, Americans are governed by a decentralized and diffused public sector, a condition that discourages graft on a global scale.
An unexpected structural factor is population:
In those American states with isolated capitals in sparsely populated regions, corruption is considerably more common. This seems to be attributable, in part, to less media coverage than the capital.
Political Ways Inhibit or Suppress The Vote
Political Factors Incumbent public officials have been known to make it difficult to vote, sometimes to protect their fraudulent shenanigans,
and this pays off, at least for a select few.
Cities that discourage voter turnout through such devices as
holding local elections on dates that differ from the dates of national or state elections,
not mailing polling place locations, or requiring voters to register one month before the election,
among other inhibitors, correlate with larger proportions of city council members who both run for re-election and who win.
The good news is that, when there is a high incidence of corruption in the American states, voter turnout increases,
a tribute to the honesty and common sense of Americans.
When it comes to corruption, voting counts.
Curbing Corruption: The Case for Balance and Will
The field has come a long way in discovering devices that can lead to cleaning up corrupt governance.
Old, New, and a Balanced Approach
Traditional corruption controls—such as audits, inspections, and civil service reform—work, but often only up to a point.
Let us not be too quick to dismiss these practices because “a strong case can be made to remain sharp” in using traditional controls, which account for “approximately one-third” of all the origins of corruption cases.
No other method of exposing public misconduct, such as whistle blowing, remotely approaches this level.
The key to curbing corruption is one of flexibly and continuously mixing methods in a balanced and sensitive manner.
Exposing Is Not Disposing We are not implying that the many methods of public management can, in and of themselves, actually eliminate graft.
Rather, they were designed only to discourage corruption by making its entry less easy and its discovery more likely.
Even to merely discourage graft, however, corruption controls must first be used. Otherwise, they are irrelevant.
Prosecuting Corruption: The Crucial Federal Role
State and local governments investigate and prosecute fraud, some quite successfully. New York City’s Department of Investigation, founded in 1873, is exemplary;
in just one decade, its officers arrested on corruption charges half of the city’s taxi, building, and plumbing inspectors.
But there are difficulties when grass-roots governments pursue grass-roots graft.
State attorneys general and district attorneys “are generally not equipped with the resources needed for a political undercover investigation”;
most are elected, which can lead to their reluctance to investigate corrupt officials in their own parties;
and “they often are hampered by state laws that are less expansive than federal ones.”
As a consequence, the federal government is central to the curtailment of corruption at every governmental level,
initiating “perhaps as many as 80 percent” of all prosecutions for public corruption in the United States.
Big Graft: Deep, Systemic, and Legal
There are far deeper and more systemic forms of corruption. Regrettably, at least in Washington, these forms are entirely legal—but are no less corrupt for it.
Washington’s Corrupt Perpetrations One such form is Washington’s revolving door, which arguably has rendered Congress and federal regulatory agencies the handmaidens of special interests;
Wall Street is particularly notorious in this regard, but there are many additional examples.
The other is the Supreme Court, which has effectively ruled that money displaces people in politics, and that corruption must be defined in such a limited way
that the Court’s definition verges on the inaccurate, or is, at best, incomplete.
Money Is Speech Congress first regulated money in politics in 1907, when it passed the Tillman Act, which banned corporate political contributions. Over the next sixty-seven years, Congress enacted laws that further restricted money’s political role.
Congress’s rationale throughout was consistently the same: the outsized influence of a wealthy few could cause corruption and greater political inequality, and undermine public trust of government.
In 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo, the Court held seven-to-one that political donations were a form of expression,
and thus were protected under the First Amendment (the Freedom of Speech Clause).
The Court also rejected Congress’s longstanding position that political contributions from the rich could lead to political inequality.
Corporations Are People—Just a Different Sort of People Who Never Die In 2010, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court confirmed, five-to-four, split along partisan lines, the Orwellian notion that money is speech, and further ruled that
the Constitution protects not only political donations from individuals, but also contributions from associations of individuals, such as corporations and unions
Purchasing Public Policies
The consequences of Buckley and Citizens United? “There is quite possibly more money in American politics today than at any point in the country’s history.”
Both decisions have rendered the United States tax code, at nearly four million words, the world’s longest. Why?
Because “America is unique among democracies in requiring, at all levels of politics, that vast amounts of cash be raised from the private sector” to win elections.
To raise this money, legislators sell amendments to the tax code to special interests, which may account for the fact that, since 2001, Congress has made, on average, one change to the tax code every day.
Buying an advantageous line in the tax code is “the world’s ultimate ‘pay for play’ setup.”
Understandably, four-fifths of Americans, “regardless of their political philosophy, party identification, age, education, sex, or income level,”
would vote to limit the amount of campaign money that congressional candidates could spend.78
Graft as a Quid-Pro-Quo Microdot
In 2014, the Court plopped the cherry on this soured sundae in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, decided five-to-four, again along partisan lines.
The ruling defined corruption in the most microscopic and narrow terms conceivable: as a quid pro quo (in essence, a direct bribe for a specific service), even though corruption almost never operates as a quid pro quo, and, when it rarely does so, it is
confined largely to the lower levels of the food chain.
To expand the power of the rich in elections in which each citizen supposedly is involved as an equal with every other citizen, and then to limit the prosecution of those who unduly influence policymakers to a form of graft that is almost never present in actuality,
is very deep and systemic corruption indeed.
From Anticorruption To Efficiency
A cruel irony of corruption controls is that, through their increasingly labyrinthine fiscal systems and time-consuming and enervating checks, rules, and red tape, they can
stymie efficient and productive governing.
Public administration, like any other phenomenon, is subject to W. Ross Ashby’s law of requisite variety, which states that regulatory (or, in our case, governing) mechanisms must equal in their complexity those of the systems that they are meant to control.
In its public plumage, Ashby’s law pertains not only to more tangled forms of corruption, but also to increasingly convoluted problems of more efficient governing.
Note: new approaches for anticorruption programs can result in improved administration, if administrators are both confident and discerning enough to pick and choose among techniques —or even parts of techniques, old as well as new—that would improve the performance of their agencies and nonprofit organizations.
It is an approach that works.
Although many of the methods of public management “have ended up being castigated and even ridiculed, these methods have provided an ever-improving series of public management techniques that can, and indeed are, improving government performance.”
Lock Them Up!
Corruption in the United States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_the_United_States
List of United States federal officials convicted of corruption offenses
List of United States state officials convicted of federal corruption offenses
List of United States local officials convicted of federal corruption offenses
Convictions of government officials
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_scandals_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_sex_scandals_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Political_scandals_in_the_United_States_by_state_or_territory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_state_and_local_politicians_convicted_of_crimes
Crime in the United States
