Oh, they are, of course, like anyone else. But they have directly paying clients to please, and thus they have a much more important reputation to keep. If any

Oh, they are, of course, like anyone else. But they have directly paying clients to please, and thus they have a much more important reputation to keep. If any foul play is caught, they stand to lose business, and thus money, while political slights might only cause the odd head or two to roll. And so, barring the bad apple or two, it tends to happen less often as long as the conditions for competition are fair. On the other hand, a state-owned agency is often very bureaucratic, and thus it has built-in deficiensies and resource hungry regulatives that slow things down to a crawl. All that does is to incentivice paying for speed, which would of course be corruption. On top of that, private companies aren't subject to change every time Government changes, and leadership change within the private sector tend to be efficiency / profit centered, while Government change is much more complex, and often based on quaint special interests that need to be politically pleased. Or the bar is set higher for it to happen, because politically changing the policies of private companies would involves actual laws that need to be voted in, rather than departmentally set regulatives.