Friday, February 20, 2009

Dealing With Corruption

There are many forms of corruption in our country. V and I once complained about a government car not being towed/moved from a no-parking area. The DCP who took our complaint was pretty diligent about it but tried to convince us that this was not corruption but misuse of power.

To me, misuse of power is just a form of corruption. However, most of our country thinks of corruption as only bribery. So, this is what I will try to address.

Bribery happens in a very very rampant way. Only very few government employees out rightly refuse an money. We should simply legalize this.

If a government employee who initiates a project will get some commission( even .2-.5%) from whoever wins the contract, they will go ahead without any prejudice. Of course, problems will arise if they take bribes on top of this commission structure.

The advantage will be great though- we the taxpayers will be making money through the taxes that are imposed on these bribes- our GDP will be much higher if our parallel economy is merged to a certain extent with the real one.

Another problem would be that bribes would be given within organizations by these employees to get to these coveted, money making jobs. Another one would be that our politicians like to impose an image of a poor person- they would not want anyone to know how much money they are making.

Theoretically, the idea was decent though.