Corruption is a very wide field – and so is the potential of using information technology to fight this phenomenon. According to Wikipedia, “... corruption is spiritual or moralimpurity or deviation from an ideal. Corruption may include many activities including bribery and embezzlement. Government, or
'political', corruption occurs when an office-holder or other governmental employee acts in an official capacity for personal gain.”
(Read more: wikipedia: Corruption)
Of course the first step in a campaign against corruption is the political will, along with an infrastructure to prevent corruption and to detect and investigate into suspicious cases. But this must go hand in hand with information technology. Think about:
•Creating a whistleblower portal that mkes it easier to point at corruption
•Establishing online services for all government services – if you are not in personal contact with government agency personnel, the money flow from hand to
hand would be much more difficult
•Implementing real-time data analytics that permanently check if all the financial transactions of your government are in line with the policies
•Automating all processes that are prone to corruption, such as procurement or – of course – the whole area of finance management and payments
Establishing a human resource information system in order to fight nepotism, which also stores data on talent management ,thus bringing transparency into promotions
and the like
Earlier on it was mentioned that you cannot easily see “fighting corruption” as asubcriterionof the overall DoingBusiness Index. Why? The methodology behind it
is completely different,and the other 10 criteria might also be more or less prone to corruption. So at best you would need to measure the exposure to corruption at the
criteria level – and since you cannot measure it directly you would need to measure the perception of corruption (like the Transparency International approach).
A method that could be pursued without throwing together apples and oranges might be a sensitivity analysis – presuming that corruption always has a negative
impact and that all the criteria carry the same risk of corruption. The impact of corruption would still be based upon estimation.
Corruption will be the subject of another SAP Point of View.