'CORRUPTION-FREE PHILIPPINES'

(NB My views on "Corruption Free Philippines," or "Zero Corruption Philippines," continues to evolve with new inputs to broaden it. It is not quixotic, as most people would think. It is achievable and sustainable although the incoming administration would prefer grafters to kill instead of putting a stop to this systemic issue. this is a revised version of my concept. The earlier paper was published by the Philippine Catholic Veritas in 2014.)
A CORRUPTION free Philippines is neither quixotic or unattainable.
A "Zero Corruption Philippines "as a political objective in either the medium or long term, or in the next six years is not only attainable; it is sustainable as well. But it has to be pursued without let up within the bounds of law.
Hence, the rule of law is the operative phrase in its quest.
Political will
because of the sheer size and magnitude of the corruption issues in the country, a strong and sustainable anticorruption agenda has to start from the top leadership. The P5.3 billion tax credit scam in the 1990s, the almost P1 billion scam in the early 2000s, and the recent P10-billion Priority Development Assistance Fund scandal are just some issues that require strong political will to meet and grapple with to their respective conclusions.
Hence, the battle against corruption should start from the top. The President, particularly the incoming, should possess the vision and clarity of thought, purity of intention, and singleness of purpose to pursue corruption and nip it completely to the bud. A half-hearted attitude towards corruption is doomed.
High risk
The overall goal of a genuine anticorruption agenda, or one that seeks the total eradication of corruption in the country, is to make corruption a high-risk crime. Any corrupt official, his cohorts and accomplices, whether in government or private sector, will have to pay a heavy price when caught and brought to the bar of justice. That crime pays is the basic rule.
This is a reversal of the prevailing orthodoxy that corruption is a low-risk, high-yield state activity in the country. So long as the big corrupt official steals, he goes unscathed and unreachable by law. The orthodoxy is that it is better to steal big because he will have the resources to pay off the law enforcers and judges.
Its complete reversal requires initiatives, ranging from policymaking to the development of a mass culture that rejects corruption as a way of life. The road to a zero corruption society is challenging and tedious, but achievable. It is not quixotic, as what corrupt officials tend to think, believe, and project publicly.
Abuse of power
Corruption is the abuse of state power for private gain. It happens when a state official or employee uses his power or office to solicit bribes or favor. This represents one side of corruption; The other side involves private persons, state functionaries who bribe or influence policymaking to gain an undue competitive advantage or secure a profitable government contract.
Bigtime corruption shows the Philippines as a soft state. It indicates its weak political will and structure to handle corrupt activity. It slows down nationbuillding. Corruption weakens investments and hinders economic growth. It brings out the political and regulatory uncertainties to bar investors from the pursuit of business plans, whether for expansion or new ventures.
Empirical studies showed that corruption happens due to wide authority, little accountability, and perverse culture of state officials and employees. It becomes lucrative, when public officials have enormous discretionary powers to control or regulate. It proliferates when the environment has "little accountability," or when the detection and punishment of corrupt practices is low or almost nonexistent.
Low salaries
Studies showed that factors that favor corruption include low salaries and rewards for performance, lack of professionalism in public service, and perverse incentive system. It thrives in an environment that lacks people who challenge or stop a corrupt activity. When whistleblowers are absent, corruption grows.
Also, corruption perpetuates in a culture that has high tolerance of wrongdoing. It disturbs, when a critical mass of people as standard operating practice considers the failure to report attempts by state officials to solicit bribes. It spreads when people tolerate questionable practices and do not report them.
Adverse effects
Studies showed the country loses at least 20 percent of its national budget to corruption. It could go higher because the current culture makes corruption a high-risk, high-yield bureaucratic activity in the country.
An anticorruption agenda is an act of self-defense of the state. It stems from the recognition that a state has the inherent right to defend itself from acts that would undermine its existence and stability. Otherwise, it will be a failed state, which could hardly enforce its laws on its subjects.
Anti-corruption agenda
The "Corruption Free Philippines" agenda contains seven major points that include legislative and private sector initiatives. These include the following:
1. The development and use of Statements of Assets and Liabilities (SALNs) as the starting point to combat corruption;
2. Increase the budgets of the three constitutional offices, the Office of the Ombudsman, the Commission on Audit (COA), and Civil Service Commission (CSC), to enable them to deal effectively with corruption;
3. Sustained lifestyle checks of public officials;
4. Enactment of the proposed Whistleblowers' Protection Act of 2014 and the Freedom of Information Act of 2014;
5. Empowerment of the private sector to go after corrupt public officials and their cohorts and accomplices in the private sector,
6. Development of a mass culture that rejects corruption as a way of life, and
7. Creation of an "anti-corruption army," which represents a critical mass of ordinary citizens, who would run after corrupt public officials.
SALNs as anticorruption weapon
All public servants submit their annual SALNs to reflect their official net worth. Those SALNs have multipurpose value. They could determine conflict of interest situations among public servants. They could serve as barometers to indicate if certain public officials inordinately acquire wealth during their incumbency.
Because all public servants are the ones who SALNs those files individually, whatever they put on those public documents could be used against them. No one is responsible for those SALNs other than the public servant who files it.
The unfortunate thing is that after their submissions, copies of SALNs stay in filing cabinets. They hardly serve any purpose. Their relevance and importance comes into surface when certain parties, aggrieved or not, start digging up the SALNs of certain public officials to build up cases against them.
Retired corporate executives and public interest advocate Benny Gonzalez has proposed the use of SALNs as anticorruption weapon. According to Gonzales, an accountant by profession, the Commission on Audit (COA) could perform auditing works of those SALNs to determine the public officials, who either overstate or understated their net worth. Or it could identify and keep track of public officials, whose net worth suddenly takes a dip or increase. Hence, it could raise red flags in the process.
The creation of the proposed Office of Public Sector Integrity, to be under the Commission on Audit, could determine in those red flags SALNs and conflict of interest situations for public servants. The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) could similarly put up a parallel office, although it could be geared towards its exercise of executive functions.
Effective deterrent
Moves to raise the budgets of the Office of the Ombudsman, COA and CSC could mean a more explicit policy shift to run after the crooks in government. The three agencies have constitutional anticorruption programs in the bureaucracy. The projected raise in their budgets could mean substantial support for these programs.
Although the Office of the Ombudsman possesses and uses its punitive and retributive powers to fight corruption, it suffers from institutional constraints to weaken its anti-corruption strategy. It hardly has the sufficient number of lawyers to go after the grafters.
It has been slow to impose administrative sanctions, investigate, and prosecute graft cases. It could not conduct intensive graft watch over the bureaucracy, engage in value formation projects among public servants, coordinate with other state agencies, and improve systems and procedures.
The anticorruption agenda means raising the budget of the Office of the Ombudsman to one percent of the national budget from nearly 0.7 percent. The budget increase would enable the Ombudsman to hire new lawyers to replace the corrupt prosecutors, who keep on filing cases that are destined to lose, and improve its dismal record of winning only seven percent of all lawsuits it has filed in court.
The Ombudsman can look into the transformation of the Office of the Ombudsman into a body similar to the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), which is pivotal in Hong Kong's transformation from the most corrupt to the second least corrupt territory in Asia.
Lifestyle checks
the pursuit and intensification the lifestyle check program among state officials and workers can provide the simplest way to identify the corruption in the bureaucracy. By proving that the lifestyle and accumulated wealth of a particular official does not commensurate to his SALN, this program can effectively deter the commission of corrupt activity, especially the high level ones
Hong Kong rose to become one of the least corrupt societies in Asia, when ICAC conducted its lifestyle checks on its officials. This is worth looking at emulating. The Office of the Ombudsman, the Department of Finance, and various agencies have their respective programs to conduct lifestyle checks, but their initiatives would have to be coordinated and sustained on a bigger and sustainable scale to investigate officials, whose lifestyle does not correspond to their legitimate income.
Whistleblowers 'Protection
The enactment of the proposed Whistleblowers' Protection Law to encourage the exposure of corruption and the Freedom of information Act to assure a free flow of information is part of the anticorruption strategy. As insiders, whistleblowers possess intimate and detailed knowledge about corrupt activity.
Encouraging them to reveal and report corrupt practices could facilitate the detection of well-hidden anomalous transactions and prosecution of its perpetrators. Exposing corrupt practices and its perpetrators could become an antidote to abuses of power for private gain.
But whistleblowers are unwilling to blow the whistle against corruption. Reasons are varied.
Either the personal costs of corruption are light to prompt individual protests against it or people would not see clear benefits from personal whistleblowing. Without protection, whistleblowers would only shoulder the heavy personal costs from an act that would primarily benefit society, but yield only remote personal benefit for them, if any.
The proposed Freedom of Information Law of 2016 would mean access to state records, lessening the burden buildups of case against the corrupt. It promotes transparency and disclosure of information even concealed. The two proposed measures could therefore prevent the commission of anomalies and uncover the existing ones.
Open Government Initiative
because of the inability of Congress to enact the FoI Law of 2016, the incoming administration could start by putting in place the local version of the proposed Open Government Initiative (OGI), which is similar to what US president Barack Obama did on his first day of office in 2009 mainly to promote accountability, openness and transparency in his government.
The incoming president could issue an executive order to institute his version of OGI to facilitate the release of official information, which various parties would ask from the government. The EO could mobilize the DBM as its main implementing agency of his OGI version and name of OGI chief implementing officer with the rank of a Cabinet undersecretary to handle all requests for releasable information.
The proposed executive order should mandate the OGI head to conduct forums and other discussions, use every available means to generate suggestions to benefit the government, complete identification of releasable and un-releasable government information, and improve their quality and quantity.
The proposed OGI Philippine version is premised on the political philosophy of "open source governance, "which seeks to open in this digital age the sources and movement of information to allow the greater participation of the general citizenry in the crafting of policies and their implementation.
It is also premised on the concept of" e-democracy "or electronic democracy , which rejects any "black box" on the issue of information.
Obama's OGI differs from the President's in the sense that Washington has its Freedom of information Law from which Obama has based his OGI, making the latter's OGI a strict and expanded implementation of the US FoI Law.
Risky activities
Few people report wrongdoing in the public service because of risks, ruined careers, ostracism and harassment by superiors and co-workers. Whistleblowers need assurance about legal support, remedies against retaliatory actions, and incentives for reporting corruption. The proposed measure can protect whistleblowers from reprisals and harassment, neutralize the social stigma of whistleblowing, lessen ostracism, secure the informant and his family, and provide legal immunity, when they make public disclosures.
Hence, the proposed whistleblowers' protection law will go a long way to encourage the "silent majority" of public officials and employees to report wrongdoings. It will mean transparency and accountability in public service. It seeks to promote a culture that rejects corruption as a way of life.
Private sector empowerment
The participation of the private sector, which includes the business community, civil society, the Church, the labor sector, and the youth and the academe, is important . Without the participation and cooperation of the private sector, the anticorruption agenda will suffer from institutional constraints.
The Church, civil society organizations, and trade unions are effective deterrents against official corruption. They can function as whistleblowers, or they can provide ample protection, wherewithal, assistance or legal help to potential whistleblowers, easing the latter's difficulties.
Code of conduct
Private firms can impose their respective codes of conduct, putting in place the overall framework for the ethical behavior of their directors, corporate officers, and employees. Hence, ethical minded employees take a positive view and practice of whistleblowing. Written internal policies on whistleblowing can complement the code of conduct.
The organization of disciplinary action committees among private firms and the institution of certification requirements towards social accountability are equally important steps to strengthen the anticorruption agenda.
Social accountability and transparency is a fundamental value that has to be propagated and enforced among the myriad of private firms and civil society organizations in the country. It deters corruption.
Labor unions can provide support for whistleblowers by providing access to management and giving them moral and financial support. Support institutions, like religious groups, the academe, business groups, and other groups from the civil society, can support advocacy work or legal assistance.
Mass culture
The anticorruption agenda will not succeed without the participation of the citizenry, or the simple people, who toil day and night to make the country a better place to live. Hence, value formation, or the development of a mass culture that rejects corruption as a way of life, will have to be developed, propagated, and instilled into the mind of ordinary citizens.
The state propaganda machinery would have to be harnessed to teach ordinary citizens and inculcate into their collective consciousness that crime pays and corruption will never go undiscovered.
The private mass media, whether traditional or nontraditional, would have to stress the positive values ​​of honesty, transparency, and accountability in public service and private citizens, who corrupt public officials and workers, will suffer the consequences of their acts.
Citizens' army
The mobilization of ordinary citizens for the anticorruption campaign will go incomplete without the creation of a citizens' army, whose agenda is to solidify the citizens' participation in the campaign against corruption, big or small.
Under the leadership of key stakeholders like the Church, civil society, labor, and academe, the citizens' army would have to mobilize the youth, the leaders of whom will inherit the mantle of the nation's leadership in a decade or two.
The citizens' army will take the vanguard role to pursue value formation. On the positive side, the citizens 'army will go to the people to stress the importance of clean government and effective governance and the value to provide honest and dedicated public service.
On the negative side, the citizens' army will expose publicly those corrupt public servants, whether he is an ordinary cop, who mulcts errant motorists in the streets, a "hoodlum in robes" who sells decisions to litigants, or a top official, who accept bribes from contractors in key state projects.
It will not hesitate to shame them publicly. In short, when the court of justice grinds slowly, the citizens' army can go to the court of public opinion to exact justice for the wrongdoings of those state officials and their cohorts.
Dead end
there is no dead end in the quest for the twin objectives of clean government and effective governance.
While the road is fraught with many dangers, a "Zero Corruption Philippines", or "Corruption Free Philippines," is achievable in the medium or long term. What the nation needs is a strong political will of its leaders and the willingness of its citizens to create a society worth living.
For sure, the incoming administration will discuss its anticorruption agenda in the days to come. It is equally important that citizens discern the genuine anticorruption agenda so that they would not fall victims to demagoguery and false promises.