By Jonathan Eyler-Werve for the Global Integrity Commons

The Global Integrity Impact Challenge asked for ideas that fight corruption, and we got them: project ideas from 16 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. Our jury of Global Integrity staffers scored and discussed each proposed project; there were many worthwhile ideas here, and it was tough to pick our finalists. But we’re confident these are solid projects, submitted by some impressive local organizations.

Each finalist project used Global Integrity’s assessment tools to identify and prioritize potential anti-corruption reforms. They then applied our information to a locally relevant, bottom-up strategy to address that governance challenge. We believe that lasting change comes from empowered local stakeholders; these projects look like a pretty good start.

We’ll introduce each of our finalists below, but first some housekeeping: three of these finalists will win this competition, receiving a prize of US$1000 and a chance to pitch the Partnership for Transparency Fund for funding to implement their ideas. You, dear readers, will decide who wins by rating the five projects here.

Global Integrity Impact Challenge: The Finalists

Click on the titles to read the full entries, then vote here:
http://tinyurl.com/impactvote

Bulgaria (LEVSKI)
A project to establish local citizen councils that invite diverse stakeholders to discuss governance issues, and directly question local officials on corruption concerns. The project aims to scale up a partial implementation of these councils that had successfully increased citizen participation.

What we liked: Wide range of stakeholders invited to contribute; potential to transform citizen relationship with government.

Cameroon (Voies Nouvelles)
A project to enable citizen dialogue and oversight of government development projects funded by the Budget d’Investissement Public. Voies Nouvelles will train local civil society groups to monitor this new government agency and facilitate engagement with government by citizens.

What we liked: Bottom-up approach empowers citizens to speak for themselves; specific, well-defined objectives.

Lithuania (Transparency International – Lithuania)
A project to protect whistleblowers who report corruption. TI-L aims to publicize existing whistleblower protection mechanisms via mass media partners, and provide concrete guidance to citizens who want to report corruption.

What we liked: Increasing effectiveness of existing governance mechanisms directly addresses the “implementation gap” identified in the Global Integrity Report: Lithuania.

Philippines (Transparency International – Philippines)
A project to engage with government watchdogs to improve integrity systems. TI-P will coordinate directly with the Presidential Commission on Good Government to increase access to information and address governance weaknesses identified in the Global Integrity Report and other metrics.

What we liked: Builds on existing collaborative relationship with government; focus on measuring outcomes.

Romania (Romanian Academic Society)
A project to monitor and publicize the actions of two agencies regulating energy and procurement. The project aims to narrow the “implementation gap” between written law and actual practice (as highlighted in the Global Integrity Report: Romania) by making citizen oversight of government agencies the rule rather than the exception.

What we liked: Narrow, carefully targeted project can be scaled up to other agencies if successful.

Click on the titles to read the full entries, then vote here:
http://tinyurl.com/impactvote

Notable project:

Macedonia (Informal group of journalists)
A project to reform campaign finance laws to bring campaigns into compliance with existing law and close loopholes that allow “black donors” to push hidden money and influence into the election process.

What we liked: This project doesn’t meet the requirements for follow up funding from PTF, so we didn’t make it a finalist. But we feel it is worthy of recognition here for being the only project taking on campaign financing, which our work has identified as a crucial governance challenge worldwide for three years running. It’s a tough, neglected issue that impacts rich and poor countries alike. Global Integrity hopes to provide advice and introductions to the applicants if they develop this idea further.

We want to thank all of our applicants for their efforts, and our friends at PTF for encouraging this contest. This contest is sponsored by Global Integrity, an independent nonprofit monitor of corruption and governance issues. To learn more about the Global Integrity Report findings that provide the research backbone of these projects, click here.

If you’d like to hear about contests like this in the future, please join our email list.

– Jonathan Eyler-Werve and Global Integrity

By Nathaniel Heller, for the Global Integrity Commons

With Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner now calling on U.S. lawmakers for at least US$100 billion in fresh taxpayer cash to support increased IMF bailouts to foreign countries, a hard look needs to be taken at governments that lack the internal controls to manage the huge inflows of capital being proposed as panaceas to the global downturn.

To ignore the fact that many foreign governments lack the ability to adequately protect taxpayer and aid donor funds from corruption and leakage is a dangerous approach that may lead to greater, not less, financial instability at the end of the day. The Obama administration’s eagerness to race ahead with hundreds of billions of new dollars for shaky (and sometimes shady) foreign economies smacks eerily of the naiveté the Bush administration displayed when it blindly dumped the original US$350 billion into the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) with little to no oversight.

While the Obama administration has indeed made a commitment to ensuring that American taxpayers can follow their stimulus money (most visibly through its www.recovery.gov website), most taxpayers around the world are not as lucky. If Geithner’s proposal is implemented, the question is not if, but rather when, significant chunks of that money will go missing.

Regardless of one’s views of the merits of the U.S. stimulus package, the American government is relatively well-equipped to provide some basic oversight to the process. Internal audit agencies such as the Government Accountability Office and the inspectors general are professional and well-staffed; the legislative branch benefits from thousands of professional committee staffers; and civil society groups and the media in the U.S. are sophisticated actors capable of bringing malfeasance to light and holding government accountable. The situation is far different abroad, however.

Overseas, Oversight is Weak

Two new reports issued by international non-governmental organizations in February 2008 highlight the very real dangers facing policymakers and citizens in developing countries where billions of dollars are similarly being poured into opaque and poorly understood financial systems. The Open Budget Index 2008, published by the International Budget Partnership, and the Global Integrity Report: 2008, published by Global Integrity, raise serious red flags.

China has announced plans for a massive stimulus package of around US$600 billion. Who’s going to follow the money in China? It’s hard to tell.

The Open Budget Index for China, which assesses the transparency and availability of key budget and auditing documents, notes, “…though China makes its audit report public and provides information on whether the audit report’s recommendations are successfully implemented, the scope of audit coverage is fairly limited.” Global Integrity’s latest assessment of China‘s anti-corruption and accountability safeguards confirms that, “…many of the [audit report] findings are shelved.” The likelihood of effective legislative oversight over the Chinese government’s bailout plans is slim; Global Integrity warns, “There is very little that [the Chinese legislature] can do to revise a budget. The budget is brief, there is not sufficient information and the process is short. The review has never been a meaningful process.”

The situation is arguably worse elsewhere, where conflicts of interest abound. In December, one of Montenegro’s largest banks won a 44 million euro bailout from the government; the bank is partially owned by the Prime Minister, his brother, and his sister.

In Serbia, where the government announced a nearly US$2 billion stimulus package in January, Global Integrity warns of a lack of conflicts of interest regulations for senior government officials, while the Open Budget Partnership observes that, “Serbia does not make its audit report public and does not provide any information on whether the audit report’s recommendations are successfully implemented.”

A month later, Lithuania’s government announced that it was preparing a US$2 billion stimulus package. Unfortunately, as Global Integrity notes in its latest assessment of the country, Lithuanian state-owned enterprises, which are likely to benefit from the increased government spending, operate with little effective controls or oversight. “No clear rules exist [for accessing state-owned companies' financial records], and in practice financial records of state-owned companies are treated as commercial secrets,” the assessment notes.

All of this is grim news for those working towards stabilizing emerging and frontier markets in the midst of a global financial meltdown. The bottom line is that pouring billions of dollars into fiscal and budgetary systems that struggle to keep track of their normal budgetary expenditures, never mind these new mass infusions of capital, is a recipe for leakage, theft, and diversion of resources. In some cases, there may even be broader political fallout should these stimulus and bailout funds be perceived as favoring a country’s elite rather than trickling down to the average citizen.

As China watchers have noted, a least part of the motivation behind Beijing’s stimulus is to tamp down growing civil unrest as unemployment rises. Should a serious scandal erupt involving Chinese stimulus funds gone missing, one wonders whether the stimulus will ultimately have hurt, rather than have helped, the government’s attempts to quell social protests.

What should be done?

What should be done in light of these challenges? Policymakers in both developing countries and multilateral institutions considering additional bailout programs should adopt at least two common-sense approaches to mitigating the risks associated with the potential for diverted capital.

First, a Hippocratic “do no harm” approach must be the starting point for any discussion. If fiscal, budgetary, and oversight mechanisms are so weak as to virtually guarantee that bailout and stimulus funds will go missing, alternatives should be explored, such as directly funding social safety net programs in lieu of attempting to jump start an economy through increased government spending at the macro level.

Second, transparency and accountability must be the watchwords of any bailout or stimulus program. Despite the underdeveloped public financial management systems in many developing countries, there are ways to monitor the flow of funds from national governments to localities through alternative approaches such as “citizen audits” and other grassroots expenditure tracking programs. At a minimum, both governments and aid donors must err on the side of transparency when it comes to identifying how, when, and where bailout funds are flowing, and both must be held accountable if and when those funds go missing. The early lessons from the U.S., especially as they relate to TARP’s lackadaisical approach to oversight, suggest that it is never too early to demand that sort of basic transparency.

– Nathaniel Heller

Nathaniel Heller is Managing Director of Global Integrity, an international non-governmental organization that tracks corruption and governance trends around the world.

Global Integrity content is free to repost in full, with attribution (CC BY).

A slap and a death threat on a public sidewalk; a radio antenna expertly sabotaged; overt warnings that some names must never be mentioned in print. Reporting on corruption in Argentina is dangerous work, and local journalists say it is getting worse.

While coming out of a store last December, Argentinian reporter Rigoberto Carrigall was confronted by two individuals who slapped him and threatened to kill him. They also ordered him to stop writing about a lawyer who until very recently was in public office and is now the executive director of a radio station.

According to Carrigall, the lawyer watched the aggression from a black BMW parked outside the store.

In February, a regional politician of the ruling party involved in a scandal told journalist Mario Otero that he´s going to rip his head off if he writes anything about his sons. When asked about it, the politician said the reporter had provoked him with an ironic comment but reiterated the threat. He added that it is also valid for any other reporter who mentions the involvement of his sons in the scandal.

Radio Goya, a small cooperative of 20 independent reporters, suffered the loss of its antennae one January night, when three of its steel wires where cut and made it fall down. The station´s representative said the type of cuts proves the attack was perpetrated by individuals who used special machinery and knew exactly which wires would affect the structure. The price of the antennae will stop the station from broadcasting for many months and, for the time being, is forcing it to broadcast from another station that reaches a far smaller audience.

These and similar cases are the first thing one notices when visiting the Argentinian Journalism Forum´s website (in Spanish) and help explain why Argentina dropped from the Moderate tier in 2007 to the Weak tier in the Global Integrity Report: 2008.

The country´s scorecard on media issues paints an ugly picture, where not only regional politicians try to restrict freedom of the press but the national government is also openly using public resources to manipulate publications.

In the Global Integrity Report: 2007, one of our peer reviewers gave the voice of alarm that in the last few years the use of cancellation of official advertising as a tool to punish or reward publications “increased tremendously”.

According to the report, under President Nestor Kirchner´s term (2003-2007) there was more self-imposed censorship than under Carlos Menem (1989-1999), who is currently on trial on arm-smuggling charges.

Menem’s legal process started after a journalistic investigation revealed that he approved the illegal sell of weapons to Croatia and Ecuador, in violation of U.N. and Organization of American States bans. He denies the charges.

There were expectations that in 2008, under new President Cristina Fernández, Kirchner´s wife, things would get better, but the Global Integrity Report: Argentina shows the opposite has happened. According to our lead researcher, the Government not only continues to utilize official advertising but has given a step forward and now even puts pressure on companies to make them advertise on certain media organizations only.

Reporters and opposition leaders point out there´s also a proliferation of private companies that sympathize with the Government and are dedicated to pursue millions in public advertising, by creating or buying media organizations.

While there is no pre-publication censorship in Argentina, “in some cases there are phone calls or verbal threats to stop the publication of information that may affect the Government´s public image”. This blog previously covered Argentina’s use of “soft censorship” via government advertising.

The tactic of punishing media by withdrawing advertising is so evident that in at least one recent case the Supreme Court ruled against that practice and more similar rulings are expected soon. However, the fight could be decided in Congress.

President Fernandez expects congressmen to start debating soon a Government-sponsored bill intended to regulate the work of the media, while the opposition is preparing on a bill to regulate the distribution of public advertising.

May freedom of the press win.

– Cross posted from the Global Integrity Commons

Jonathan Eyler-Werve reporting for the Global Integrity Commons

This week, US Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) calls for the release of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports to the public.

These are taxpayer funded research studies used in Congressional debate. The reports are secret by Congressional tradition because, let’s face it, facts disrupt spin. Our friends at the Project on Government Oversight have the story. Many have tried to publish these documents by law, but this may be the year it finally happens. We covered the recent leak and publication of the entire CRS library on the Commons last month.

The CRS reports currently top a list of “Most Wanted Federal Government Documents.” You can vote for your favorites at the link, and frankly all of them should be public. Rounding out the top three:

1. CRS Reports
2. Bailout money recipiants
3. Patriot Act usage by Department of Justice

The site is brought to you by the good folks at OpenTheGovernment.org, Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

This week, the State of California completed its investigation into why their electronic voting machines quietly deleted 197 ballots in the November 2008 election in Humboldt County. The loss was discovered only after discrepancies in the vote count were found by the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, a local watchdog.

The investigation report (also: background docs) throws the blame solidly on junk software provided by Premier Election Systems, a company so widely ridiculed that it abandoned it old name, Diebold, in 2007.

The fundamental problem with the systems used in Humboldt County is that the software creates no permanent records of votes cast (i.e. paper receipts).

Instead everything is tossed in a database, which as this case ably demonstrates, is only as good as its software. When Premier/Diebold found a flaw that could lead to a user unknowingly erasing a stack of votes, they sent an ambiguous email warning to election officials… in 2004. They didn’t however, correct the software in the counties where it was deployed.

The problems don’t stop there. The investigation also noted that the Premier/Diebold software has, nestled between the “Print”, “Save As” and “Close” buttons, a button labeled “Clear”. This button deletes the permanent audit logs which record (in theory) everything that happens on the machine. There is no “Are you sure?” confirmation or notification of what has happened after the button is pressed. It just wipes out, with one stray click, the federally mandated log files. According to California’s report, a 2001 internal email discussing the addition of the button noted that “there are too many reasons why doing that is a bad idea.” They did it anyway.

The report concludes:

GEMS version 1.18.19 [the software running the election] contains a serious software error that caused the omission of 197 ballots from the official results… Key audit trail logs in GEMS version 1.18.19 do not record important operator interventions such as deletion of decks of ballots, assign inaccurate date and time stamps to events that are recorded, and can be deleted by the operator. The number of votes erroneously deleted from the election results reported by GEMS in this case greatly exceeds the maximum allowable error rate established by HAVA [Help America Vote Act of 2002].

It’s logging inaccurate dates? How sloppy is this product?

The Global Integrity Commons covered Premier/Diebold before the election, citing “serious doubts” on Premier/Diebold voting machines.

They aren’t doubts anymore: it’s public record that these things are zapping votes into the ether, and without attentive watchdog groups, there is no indication whatsoever that anything is amiss. How many times has this happened without getting noticed? What happens when someone wants to delete votes?

We can only hope that more states using these systems will follow California’s lead and hold public hearings on whether to decertify the Premier/Diebold systems in use.

I’ll say it again: if buying a medium nonfat latte merits a paper receipt, so does the ballot.

– Jonathan Eyler-Werve, reporting for the Global Integrity Commons

The Global Integrity Report is a bottom-up look at what’s working and what’s failed in efforts to fight corruption and abuses of power. I’m using this diary to share some of the findings with Red State readers. — Jonathan Eyler-Werve

The Global Integrity Report: 2008, released this week, covered more countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) than ever before; among the Report’s key findings is that when MENA is compared to the rest of the world, the most significant anti-corruption performance lag is not election integrity but poor access to government information.

While there are a small number of success stories in the Middle East and North Africa (such as Jordan), Arab countries assessed in the Global Integrity Report: 2008 are overwhelmingly behind the rest of the world in providing basic transparency mechanisms for citizens to access government information. When compared to all other regions in the world, the access to information deficit in the Middle East and North Africa is roughly double those countries’ deficit on any other issue assessed by Global Integrity. That staggering transparency gap generates negative spillover effects across government, politics, and public policy in the Middle Eastern and Northern African countries assessed.

(For details of the Global Integrity approach, see methodology, download XLS data or dig into the scorecards.)

Without basic transparency mechanisms in place, citizens and businesses have no way to monitor government budgets or public procurement; have no way of knowing which companies or countries are funding the campaigns of their elected leaders; and lack the basic tools to monitor the performance of other key anti-corruption bodies such as audit agencies and anti-corruption commissions. While the average citizen may tend to use access to information mechanisms for daily services such as obtaining land records or birth certificates, anti-corruption watchdogs in the media and civil society can be significantly hampered without effective and regular access to government documents and records.

Access to Information and Economic Growth

Similarly discouraging can be the negative effect of poor access to information on the business climate, especially for foreign investors unfamiliar with the local market. Access to information helps to level the playing field for businesses involved with government procurement and privatization by making the “rules of the game” transparent to all competitors; it can also help to streamline licensing and permitting processes by limiting discretion on the part of public officials. All other factors being equal, these Middle Eastern and North African countries’ poor performance on information transparency could be a red flag for foreign investors and multinationals assessing opportunities in the region.

2008 marked the first year that Global Integrity gathered Integrity Indicators data in the West Bank, and the access to information situation there was little better than the rest of the region; in fact, systemic governance challenges seem to be the norm in the troubled territory. Despite relatively effective electoral mechanisms in the West Bank, we report how, “Political considerations, personal loyalties, family connections, and the like serve as common factors in hiring, firing, and promotion of civil servants,” while, “The government rarely acts on the findings of the [human rights] ombudsman.” In the context of the ongoing conflict in the Palestinian territories, poor government transparency can certainly be of little help in closing the gap in trust between Palestinian political leaders and their citizens, a dynamic that only hampers the peace process.

Other country-specific findings in the region include:

Egypt: There are laws that actively prohibit citizens from accessing government information and records. For example, Law No. 35 (established in 1950) prohibits publishing any information related to the government; offenders risk imprisonment. The personal asset disclosure records of all state employees are considered “official” documents and are therefore prohibited from being made public to citizens, rendering them useless as an anti-corruption deterrent. Interestingly, however, the legal framework and enforcement of citizen access to privatization regulations and bids are relatively strong, so the climate for privatization in Egypt remains somewhat positive.

Iraq: There is no legal right of public access to government information in the Iraqi constitution. Government audit reports are not accessible publicly and are kept strictly within the Prime Minister’s office. While there is a legal framework for citizens to be able to access the financial disclosure records of senior government officials, the requirement for those officials to submit reports is not enforced effectively, and there is no evidence of anyone having ever accessed such disclosure records in practice.

Jordan: In contrast with most countries in the region, Jordan has a law (circa 2007) guaranteeing citizens the right to access government information. Citizens, for example, can access the results of public procurement bids either through the department of public procurement website or via text message. However, while the public can obtain information and records at a reasonable cost and within a reasonable timeframe, the government exercises considerable discretion in granting and denying applications for information requests. In addition, a government secrecy law considerably weakens the effectiveness of the new right to information law.

– Global Integrity (www.globalintegrity.org)