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Why Paying Bribes Should Be Legal

106 points by kqr2 16y ago

michaelchisari 16y ago
The second half of this is left out: Why Paying Bribes Should Be Legal To Pay, But Illegal To Accept This changes the meaning considerably.
- wisty 16y ago
  Also, this is only suggested for someone paying a bribe "to receive something they are legally entitled to receive." The example is an official demanding a bribe to process a tax return. It wouldn't apply to someone paying a bribe to avoid a speeding ticket.
  - erikb 16y ago
    And also those who like to keep a good relationship to the officials they have to work with on a daily basis. I can't prove or test it, but I assume that this category contains the biggest amount of people AND money concerning bribery. "Doing favors" to each other is just a basic social activity, especially if the other person is one with the power to change your life to better or worse.
    - wisty 16y ago
      In the US and China, yes. Outright bribery is rare, but people with "connections" get special treatment. However, the article is about India, a country where corruption is so rampant that there's an Association of Dead People, who can't afford the bribe to have themselves "reinstated" after they were reported dead. "Hi, I'd like to report, my in-laws declared me to be deceased, and have stolen my house and land." "Hmm, your name? OK, it seems you are dead." "Yes, and my house has been stolen. I'd like to file a complaint." "You can't." "Why?" "You are dead." People spend decades trying to get back on the books. It would be hilarious if it wasn't true.
  - jamesaguilar 16y ago
    At least in American law, this is already true. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act)
scythe 16y ago
Shouldn't you just be able to report the corrupt official for not giving you the refund in the first place?
- joeguilmette 16y ago
  well, by making it so that paying bribes is legal, and being convicted of receiving a bribe results in having to pay it back, the briber is incentivized to entice officials and then to turn them in. by simply making it so that you can turn them in there isn't really an incentive for the briber to go through the hassle of doing so.
- bdhe 16y ago
  The corrupt official is not going to be straightforward. Think of a convoluted system where the official can put you behind tons of red tape (you might literally spend hours filling up nonsensical forms). But a small price to pay and -poof- all the red tape vanishes. Reporting such (clearly) corrupt officials itself might involve paying bribes (think recursive) or might involve a court date months into the future which completely defeats the purpose. The justice system is itself part of the corruption problem.
  - markbao 16y ago
    This is what happens in a lot of third-world countries, India included. It would be impossible to get anything done business-wise in some countries that are heavy on bribes—without bribes, it would take forever to get licenses, building permits, and other government-mandated items for doing business, whereas a bribe would put you on the fast track.
    - bdhe 16y ago
      > It would be impossible to get anything done business-wise ... You'd be surprised how a background verification and other processing for a passport application can require four months without a bribe but less than a couple of weeks if the right hands are greased. I think corruption is a real problem if ordinary Joe cannot function without ending up bribing someone.
thematt 16y ago
The situation where somebody is being forced to pay a bribe is already illegal. Why do I actually have to pay it in order for the authorities to do something about it? This seems erroneously predicated on the assumption that the briber is doing so because he knows the payer will be complicit in the crime. I think the more likely scenario is that the briber does this because he has no fear of the authorities or their ability to enforce such laws.
- elehack 16y ago
  Because, at the end of the day, you still need your tax return or whatever it is, and the bribe-requester is preventing you from getting it. Going through the legal system, if it even works, would take quite a while.
sbov 16y ago
This seems fine when you have to bribe someone to get something you should already be getting. But what about when you bribe for other things, such as access to information you shouldn't have access to? Or to get certain laws passed?
- kd0amg 16y ago
  From the article: Finally, Basu's suggestion applies only to one type of bribe: When someone has to pay a bribe to receive something they are legally entitled to receive. Basu makes it clear that it should still be illegal to pay other types of bribes. So, for example, it would still be illegal for a big company to pay a bribe to win a government contract.
matthew-wegner 16y ago
Permits and things are already quite bribe-like: Owner: "Can I open a store here?" City: "No." Owner: "How about if I paid you, say, $500?" City: "OK then!"
- celoyd 16y ago
  Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on the structural corruption of the regulatory system – i.e., whether permits and such are fairly priced. For example, we could make a kind of slippery slope argument going the other way as well: “Can I use this service you offer at $500?” “No.” “How about if I pay you $500?” “Okay then!”
- lucasjung 16y ago
  It's not even always so blatant. I currently live in a rural county in Maryland. A buddy of mine built a detached garage last year. Parts of it he contracted out, and the contractors handled the permits. Other parts he did himself, and so had to file for his permits in person. It went something like this: Homeowner: "I'd like a permit to build a garage." County Clerk: "Your contractor will handle the permits for you." Homeowner: "I'm going to build it myself." County Clerk: "Why would you do something so selfish? Don't you want to create jobs for hard-working locals by hiring a contractor?" "Hard-working locals" being a euphemism for "My friends and relatives." The parts that were handled by contractors sailed through inspections. The parts he did himself, he had to wait months for a county inspector to come out and in some cases was repeatedly failed for bogus reasons. Nobody ever wanted a direct bribe, they just wanted him to pay their friends/family for services he didn't need.
  - olegious 16y ago
    "Why would you do something so selfish..." Just got an "Atlas Shrugged" flashback ;).
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    Would you mind naming the county?
- 16y ago
georgecmu 16y ago
("Orthogonal" is a jargony way of saying "opposed.") Update: Several commenters raised questions about my gloss of "orthogonal." So I emailed Basu to ask him how he was using the word here. His answer: "Orthogonal interests are interests pulling in opposite directions." Yeah... someone needs a refresher in linear algebra and a reminder not to use words the meaning of which he doesn't know.
- pingswept 16y ago
  Agreed. Can we just be clear? "Orthogonal" means "perpendicular."
  - AndyKelley 16y ago
    Seems clear to me. Parallel == same direction. Perpendicular == different directions.
    - A1kmm 16y ago
      Parallel can mean in the same direction, or it can mean in exactly opposite directions. North and south train lines might run parallel to each other, for example. In plain English, two things are orthogonal if they are unrelated or independent of each other. In linear algebra, this meaning is given a more specific technical meaning of perpendicular; transforming a point p by a vector u that is orthogonal to a basis vector v to get p' means that p and p' have the same multiplier on v (i.e. the contribution of v is independent of transformations orthogonal to v)
      - Luyt 16y ago
        I associate 'orthogonal' with CPU instruction sets: the ability to combine any instruction with any register (and adressing mode).
        jrockway 16y ago
        Well, it's a vector math term.
_pius 16y ago
I found the incorrect usage of the word "orthogonal" in the article much more distracting than I'd have expected.
JoshTriplett 16y ago
This change (making bribes legal for the payer, just not the payee) seems highly sensible. Right now, if an official demands a bribe for something you have a right to in the first place, you can attempt to report them, but meanwhile you have to do without, with the associated cost to you. With this change, you can still report the person demanding the bribe, but in the meantime you can choose whether it would cost you less to go ahead and pay the bribe (and hope to get it back later) than to do without whatever you'd needed in the first place. This won't help in all cases, though: as I understand it, some countries (including the US) have laws against paying bribes in other countries, even when such a prohibition effectively prevents doing business in those countries.
- alextp 16y ago
  Except bribes undermine social fairness significantly. Notice that as the clerk presumably knows how much money he should give you for your tax returns there is a strong incentive for him to ask for a bribe that covers a significant share of your tax returns, effectively making the entire tax return process useless for the citizen. Also, if you think of a slightly different scenario, imagine the office is only allowed to issue X tax returns a month (maybe the money comes in packets), and the bribe is required to cut the line. Now it's really unfair and wrong, and a lot more so for the briber than for the bribee. You should have in mind that it's not actually that hard to bribe people indirectly. Any place with a bribing culture tends to have people you can hire to unofficially bribe some government employee to do something for you. In Brazil these are called "despachantes" (dispatchers), and even though in the last decade or so they have been getting progressively more useless as the country moves away from a bribing culture, you should keep in mind that a lot of despachantes are legally incorporated and even pay taxes. One can't be blamed for hiring that sort of person.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    In Brazil...in the last decade or so they have been getting progressively more useless as the country moves away from a bribing culture... Just curious, could you elaborate on how and why this has occurred? (Moving away from a bribing culture, I mean.) Also, do you think other countries could do the same thing?
duopixel 16y ago
I grew up in Mexico and I can see the logic behind this, I don't think it would work in practice: People usually give bribes when they've done something wrong, not when they are entitled to something. If a clerk asked me for a bribe in exchange for tax refund, I'd demand to talk to his supervisor, and I'm pretty sure he'd shit bricks and pretend to be joking. Let's say I fail a driving test, the clerk insinuates (because it's never obvious) an extra "fee" might help me get my licence: 1. What if the clerk never suggested a bribe, but instead I threatened to accuse him of bribery if he didn't give me a passing score? 2. If he did suggest a bribe, would my licence still be valid? 3. A bribed official would never give you a receipt of your bribery, how are they going to know if what you're saying is true? I can picture trolls affirming they were bribed by thousands of traffic officers in hopes of profitting from a faulty system.
- ajays 16y ago
  "People usually give bribes when they've done something wrong, not when they are entitled to something." Oh how wrong you are. In India, if you don't bribe, you won't get the service you need and are entitled to. I can give examples, but HN's disks may overflow. For example: to get a passport, you need a certificate of residency (or something like that, it's been a while) from the local police station. Unless you bribe the cops there, they'll never mail it in. Basically, in India, every touchpoint of the government machinery has a bribe slot. If you ever need a service from the government, you need to pay up. It simply does not matter how deserving your case is. There are examples aplenty of old pensioners having to bribe the pension officers to collect their own pensions! Corruption is a cruel system that abuses the most vulnerable and weak in society. The rich can use it to their advantage, and hence they don't care (one neighbor of ours became a multi-millionaire by bribing and selling sub-standard equipment to the Indian Railways ). The poor, on the other hand, get taken advantage of. I have seen, with my own eyes, mothers pawning their wedding jewelry to raise money for bribes so their sons could get a government job. It brought tears to my eyes, and this is why I hate that fucking system with a passion.
phylofx 16y ago
As one commenter on the article pointed out, the scenario described is "extortion", not bribery, so there shouldn't be any legal consequences for the person extorted in such a way anyway. "Most states define extortion as the gaining of property or money by almost any kind of force, or threat of 1) violence, 2) property damage, 3) harm to reputation, or 4) unfavorable government action." bribery is "the receiving or offering any undue reward by or to any person whomsoever, whose ordinary profession or business relates to the administration of public justice, in order to influence his behaviour in office and to incline him to act contrary to his duty and the known rules of honesty and integrity."
eapen 16y ago
In India, it is almost impossible to get something done without giving a bribe and especially if you need something in time. If not, the bribe-expecting government workers will keep you waiting till you are ready to hand over the bribe. I didn't realize it was illegal to give a bribe in India, so I guess I can't even admit to having done that - which is ridiculous! When I needed to get a document in India (in a more rural area), the young government official, who I assumed was above all this corruption, kept telling me to come later (when there were fewer people around) and had me go to a nearby Xerox shop to get copies of a document. While I was going there, the official called the guy at the Xerox shop and told him to tell me how the process works. Suffice to say that I gave something and apparently that wasn't enough, so I had my mom visit him the next day and he made a comment that I hadn't given enough. My mom just smiled, picked up the certificate (which was in front of him) and left. On the other hand, reporting an official is still a bit scary knowing that him or his partners-in-crime can accidentally mess up any of the other official documents and since most of the documents are still on paper and not digitized, it could throw you down into a deeper hole. Unless a massive campaign against corruption is introduced, I dont see this problem going away anytime soon.
- wslh 16y ago
  Same in Argentina, is how things work.
- zaa 16y ago
  Basically, this applies to a lot of developing countries (I believe, to Russia, India, Brazil, African countries, etc). USA also has it, but at a bigger scale (think of a politician supporters, the Cenate, etc). Personally, I think bribes in one or another form are just inevitable. It is just a part of human nature.
cheez 16y ago
Yipes, the incentive not to report is high. I don't know that this will do anything.
joe_the_user 16y ago
It's not that clear cut. It seems like whoever has the most leverage and can initiate the transaction should go to jail. Company which offers pay an EPA official ten times their salary to look the other for pollution should be the prosecuted party. But a police officer who extracts a $50 bribe for ignoring a ticket should, on the other hand, wind-up being the one prosecuted.
- chrisbennet 16y ago
  Read the whole article.
aufreak3 16y ago
I'm left wondering whether such direct intervention of the legal system is the only way to contain the rampant bribery. For instance, what if employment contracts for officials make them agree to an "I will not accept bribes and I understand that I can be fired for doing so" clause, and also a "I hereby declare that have not accepted bribes in the past and understand that I can be fired if it was found to be otherwise". I'm using loose language, but that kind of thing can tie bribes to contract laws and impact the employability anywhere of an official who accepts bribes. To further facilitate evidence collection, it can be made legal to secretly record (as audio/video) transactions solely intended to expose corrupt officials.
- archangel_one 16y ago
  Surely the fact that accepting bribes is illegal would implictly mean that employees could be fired for doing so? I can't imagine that adding a bit of extra language to the employment contract saying "don't do illegal thing x" is going to stop people from doing it any more than the fact that x is illegal in the first place.
  - aufreak3 16y ago
    Adding laws about bribery demands new legal machinery. I was wondering whether the need for that can be bypassed by piggy backing on contract law.
- whatusername 16y ago
  The point the OP was trying to make is that such legislative changes make it easier to catch bribery (and thus -- it would diminish). If paying you a bribe is illegal -- then I'll do it and cover my tracks. If paying you a bribe is legal and as bonus I get my money back if I rat you out -- then that's awesome for me. But the likely case is -- you wont be asking for that bribe anymore -- as you know it's now a lose/win situation.
- gradschool 16y ago
  See http://india.5thpillar.org/ZRN http://india.5thpillar.org/ZRN for an innovative approach to fighting bribery. An organization has printed official looking ¨zero rupee notes¨ which people give to officials demanding a bribe, and has reported some success in deterring the practice.
sliverstorm 16y ago
This might even fix the opposite case, where the briber initiates the bribe, and the receiver of the bribe wasn't looking for a bribe. The receiver has to decide, do I refuse knowing that the briber can freely inform the law I accepted his bribe without fear of retribution?
shalinmangar 16y ago
The article assumes that a functioning judicial and investigative system exists which can help you in a reasonable amount of time. If that were the case, bribery wouldn't have become so rampant in the first place. How is one supposed to show evidence of wrongdoing? What keeps the government official from exercising his powers and punishing the reporter in the future?
kolinko 16y ago
This is the way it works in Poland. We had a change in law a couple of years ago exactly due to the reasons you stated. One thing I don't know about our law though - if I try to bribe someone (say - Policeman), and he refuses, can I be prosecuted? I don't know about our law, but it would be interesting if trying to bribe someone would be illegal, but bribing someone was legal.
- spindritf 16y ago
  > This is the way it works in Poland. Not really. There is an exemption if you inform the law enforcement before they detect it themselves though. > One thing I don't know about our law though - if I try to bribe someone (say - Policeman), and he refuses, can I be prosecuted? Yes, art. 229. k.k. It's not even terribly unlikely that you will get arrested on the spot, '90s are over. IANAL.
grease 16y ago
Not sure this works in all cases. This will work assuming you have money to pay the bribe in the first place. There is no way to protect you from getting asked for a bribe (that you cannot pay).
deleted 16y ago
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srgseg 16y ago
Map of World corruption: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/World_Map_Index_of_perception_of_corruption_2010.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/World_Map... (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index)
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Map of world perception of corruption. It's an important distinction.
teyc 16y ago
That assumes that the government employees are independent of one another and will not "punish" the person reporting the incident. What works better is a system where the PM alone is allowed to take bribes with impunity but no one else is allowed to. The reasoning behind this is it gives the PM and his inner circle sufficient financial independence to implement anti-corruption measures. For example, the central government in China has been known to mete out capital punishments on mid-ranking politicians found to take bribes. This limits the base of people who are able to seek an economic rent on the basis of their position. Like any triangle, the people at the top may get filthy rich and in many sense untouchable; they will be able to keep the large pool of people below them honest.
- galadriel 16y ago
  This would only work if the top level official wants bribe only for high level project. The approach would fail in India, where every amount of bribe has fixed distribution, from bottom most official to the top. Say for example you wallet got lost, and you need to file an police report. The bribe you pay at police station would not be to the local official alone, but a cut of it would extend all the way over to top till the Home secretary. No one wants to punish anyone in such cases. This allows top-most official to acquire a much larger wealth than they would if they stopped corruption at lower level
  - teyc 16y ago
    This type of bribes already occur through taxation, traffic fines and other processing charges. These allow public servants to earn a bonus on top of their normal wages. This is the effect of bribery tainting everybody up the chain. However, if bribery were to be legalised only at the highest level, then the highest leaders will have no incentive to accept bad bribes from their subordinates.
stretchwithme 16y ago
What are they talking about? Bribes ARE legal. All you have to do is call it a campaign contribution. But, yeah, its the politicians that should be prosecuted for taking, not people who are victims of the shakedown. And it is a shakedown when in order to do business in a particular fields all of your competition is already bribing and if you don't, you're screwed. Of course, the reason the politician has power to abuse is that he has power he shouldn't even have. So its really our fault for allowing the concentration of power or believing power is supposed to be concentrated.
- Goladus 16y ago
  The kind of bribe discussed in the article isn't like a campaign contribution, it's regular people bribing rank-and-file government clerks and police, which happens as a matter of course in India and many other countries.
  - stretchwithme 16y ago
    And if you read the rest of my comment, you would see I am aware of that.
angus77 16y ago
I always thought it should be the opposite---paying bribes should be illegal, but accepting them legal. It would be like collecting a reward for turning in the briber.
- dchest 16y ago
  There's a fatal flaw in this scheme: the person who accepted a bribe is now in position to extort money from the briber forever.
- smazero 16y ago
  Yeah but this wouldn't address the key problem outlined in the article. The issue this is trying to tackle is that of people being forced to pay bribes for things they are legally, perfectly entitled to. The corruption this is aimed at is the corruption endemic to the civil service/government that it's impossible to avoid in everyday life.
- cturner 16y ago
  I've never heard of laws working in the way I will describe, but I've got a better algorithm. The crime is this: to (1) participate in bribery and (2) to not be the first party to report it to the authorities. Immediately that the bribe has occurred, a race initiates between the two parties to be the first to register it with the authorities. The bribe money becomes prize money to the winner, with the loser facing consequences.
sagarun 16y ago
The scenario described in the article is not bribe, it is extortion.
deleted 16y ago
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known 16y ago
India cannot be free from corruption unless it disintegrates like USSR.
- Deestan 16y ago
  It didn't help USSR, though. Corruption is rampant in Russia.
  - known 16y ago
    But remaining republics of USSR are relatively free from corruption https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Republics_of_the_Soviet_Union https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Republics_of_...
dchest 16y ago
I like the idea [edit: on a second thought, as commenters pointed out, the described process is extortion, not bribery]. Unfortunately, improvement requires that bribe reporting system is not corrupt (police, courts, etc.), which, I think, is not the case for countries with high corruption rates.
- wisty 16y ago
  It's easy. Just have make a publicly visible issue tracking system. Issues could be tracked, and punishments recorded (if applicable). You could put a little bit of identity protection in (i.e. Officer 123 vs Customer 345).
  - dchest 16y ago
    Records: - Customer 345 reported a bribe. - Officer 123 has been cleaned from false reporting. Non-records: Customer 345 thrown into jail for possession of drugs.
known 16y ago
In India, bribe is considered as a tip that we give to waiter/waitress in US. http://truthaboutindiacorruption.org/ http://truthaboutindiacorruption.org/
sandstrom 16y ago
Although prostitution and bribes isn't that related, I know Sweden did something similar — the supply side of prostitution is legal but buying isn't. From what I know I think it has worked fairly well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden#Purchasing_sex_.28Brottsbalk_6.11.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden#Purchasi... I know something similar is also used for collusion in the US, where a party that is first to snitch can avoid prosecution. Although there are undoubtedly other ways of curbing corruption, e.g. competition between agencies driving down bribes to zero (in theory at least), this could work.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Something I've never understood. People advocate to make only the buying side of prostitution illegal. The same people often advocate to make only the selling side of drugs illegal. It's a weird dichotomy I can't wrap my head around. (I realize that some people may favor only one of these policies, but I don't think the intersection of people favoring both is empty.)
  - cturner 16y ago
    I was thinking about last night. I see logic in it. (1) Target the people who you have best hope of affecting the behaviour of. (2) Avoiding compounding damage to people who are already messed up. Prostitution attracts girls who are already degraded. It's common for the girls to have been sexually abused as a child, physically abused as a young wife, or to have drug issues. Participation in the trade suggests that the person is not a full-functioning citizen. A motivation for outlawing prostitution is paternalistic: it's a dynamic that causes this a concentrated group of people with existing problems to spiral further. Using the legal system to target people in that situation for their own good is counterproductive. They have low faith in government and institutions already, and jailing them probably isn't going to help that. You just end up pushing them into and out of new institutions, but they keep practicing because the business is there and they don't take control of their lives to rise out of it. Whereas the business that fuels prostitution is vulnerable to the dynamic of the police and legal system. Users are usually people who are full participants in society and are vulnerable to shame and the threat of jail time. They generally have a good understanding of rights/responsibility even if they have periods where they hold themselves to be above it. I sometimes read that prostitution is "misogynistic". It's not. For the most part the users don't think about the circumstances of the girls at all. Some people don't naturally behave with concern for other people's circumstance, and the stick attempts to compensate for that.
Goladus 16y ago
In US Culture, there's still plenty of reason to discourage people from offering bribes. Offering bribes encourages corruption. The victims of a bribe in the US are typically everyone BUT the briber and the collector. If you're at a restaurant and bribe a maitre d' to bump up your priority for a table, he pockets some cash you get your table and all the people following the rules get boned. The briber is not being exploited at all. This scenario is probably not illegal and certainly not a big deal, but is a good example of the way our cultural rules usually work. In a place like India, where it's typical for government workers to expect bribes and refuse service without it, or for police to hassle people about trivial things like whether the mirror on your bike is adjusted properly, it's really more appropriately called extortion. The victims are the people paying the 'bribes.' The only one who really benefits is the collector. In that case it makes more sense to focus on solving the problem from that angle.

106 points by kqr2 16y ago

The second half of this is left out: Why Paying Bribes Should Be Legal To Pay, But Illegal To Accept This changes the meaning considerably.

wisty 16y ago
Also, this is only suggested for someone paying a bribe "to receive something they are legally entitled to receive." The example is an official demanding a bribe to process a tax return. It wouldn't apply to someone paying a bribe to avoid a speeding ticket.
- erikb 16y ago
  And also those who like to keep a good relationship to the officials they have to work with on a daily basis. I can't prove or test it, but I assume that this category contains the biggest amount of people AND money concerning bribery. "Doing favors" to each other is just a basic social activity, especially if the other person is one with the power to change your life to better or worse.
  - wisty 16y ago
    In the US and China, yes. Outright bribery is rare, but people with "connections" get special treatment. However, the article is about India, a country where corruption is so rampant that there's an Association of Dead People, who can't afford the bribe to have themselves "reinstated" after they were reported dead. "Hi, I'd like to report, my in-laws declared me to be deceased, and have stolen my house and land." "Hmm, your name? OK, it seems you are dead." "Yes, and my house has been stolen. I'd like to file a complaint." "You can't." "Why?" "You are dead." People spend decades trying to get back on the books. It would be hilarious if it wasn't true.
- jamesaguilar 16y ago
  At least in American law, this is already true. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act)

scythe 16y ago

Shouldn't you just be able to report the corrupt official for not giving you the refund in the first place?

joeguilmette 16y ago
well, by making it so that paying bribes is legal, and being convicted of receiving a bribe results in having to pay it back, the briber is incentivized to entice officials and then to turn them in. by simply making it so that you can turn them in there isn't really an incentive for the briber to go through the hassle of doing so.
bdhe 16y ago
The corrupt official is not going to be straightforward. Think of a convoluted system where the official can put you behind tons of red tape (you might literally spend hours filling up nonsensical forms). But a small price to pay and -poof- all the red tape vanishes. Reporting such (clearly) corrupt officials itself might involve paying bribes (think recursive) or might involve a court date months into the future which completely defeats the purpose. The justice system is itself part of the corruption problem.
- markbao 16y ago
  This is what happens in a lot of third-world countries, India included. It would be impossible to get anything done business-wise in some countries that are heavy on bribes—without bribes, it would take forever to get licenses, building permits, and other government-mandated items for doing business, whereas a bribe would put you on the fast track.
  - bdhe 16y ago
    > It would be impossible to get anything done business-wise ... You'd be surprised how a background verification and other processing for a passport application can require four months without a bribe but less than a couple of weeks if the right hands are greased. I think corruption is a real problem if ordinary Joe cannot function without ending up bribing someone.

thematt 16y ago

The situation where somebody is being forced to pay a bribe is already illegal. Why do I actually have to pay it in order for the authorities to do something about it? This seems erroneously predicated on the assumption that the briber is doing so because he knows the payer will be complicit in the crime. I think the more likely scenario is that the briber does this because he has no fear of the authorities or their ability to enforce such laws.

elehack 16y ago
Because, at the end of the day, you still need your tax return or whatever it is, and the bribe-requester is preventing you from getting it. Going through the legal system, if it even works, would take quite a while.

sbov 16y ago

This seems fine when you have to bribe someone to get something you should already be getting. But what about when you bribe for other things, such as access to information you shouldn't have access to? Or to get certain laws passed?

kd0amg 16y ago
From the article: Finally, Basu's suggestion applies only to one type of bribe: When someone has to pay a bribe to receive something they are legally entitled to receive. Basu makes it clear that it should still be illegal to pay other types of bribes. So, for example, it would still be illegal for a big company to pay a bribe to win a government contract.

matthew-wegner 16y ago

Permits and things are already quite bribe-like: Owner: "Can I open a store here?" City: "No." Owner: "How about if I paid you, say, $500?" City: "OK then!"

celoyd 16y ago
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on the structural corruption of the regulatory system – i.e., whether permits and such are fairly priced. For example, we could make a kind of slippery slope argument going the other way as well: “Can I use this service you offer at $500?” “No.” “How about if I pay you $500?” “Okay then!”
lucasjung 16y ago
It's not even always so blatant. I currently live in a rural county in Maryland. A buddy of mine built a detached garage last year. Parts of it he contracted out, and the contractors handled the permits. Other parts he did himself, and so had to file for his permits in person. It went something like this: Homeowner: "I'd like a permit to build a garage." County Clerk: "Your contractor will handle the permits for you." Homeowner: "I'm going to build it myself." County Clerk: "Why would you do something so selfish? Don't you want to create jobs for hard-working locals by hiring a contractor?" "Hard-working locals" being a euphemism for "My friends and relatives." The parts that were handled by contractors sailed through inspections. The parts he did himself, he had to wait months for a county inspector to come out and in some cases was repeatedly failed for bogus reasons. Nobody ever wanted a direct bribe, they just wanted him to pay their friends/family for services he didn't need.
- olegious 16y ago
  "Why would you do something so selfish..." Just got an "Atlas Shrugged" flashback ;).
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  Would you mind naming the county?
16y ago

georgecmu 16y ago

("Orthogonal" is a jargony way of saying "opposed.") Update: Several commenters raised questions about my gloss of "orthogonal." So I emailed Basu to ask him how he was using the word here. His answer: "Orthogonal interests are interests pulling in opposite directions." Yeah... someone needs a refresher in linear algebra and a reminder not to use words the meaning of which he doesn't know.

pingswept 16y ago
Agreed. Can we just be clear? "Orthogonal" means "perpendicular."
- AndyKelley 16y ago
  Seems clear to me. Parallel == same direction. Perpendicular == different directions.
  - A1kmm 16y ago
    Parallel can mean in the same direction, or it can mean in exactly opposite directions. North and south train lines might run parallel to each other, for example. In plain English, two things are orthogonal if they are unrelated or independent of each other. In linear algebra, this meaning is given a more specific technical meaning of perpendicular; transforming a point p by a vector u that is orthogonal to a basis vector v to get p' means that p and p' have the same multiplier on v (i.e. the contribution of v is independent of transformations orthogonal to v)
    - Luyt 16y ago
      I associate 'orthogonal' with CPU instruction sets: the ability to combine any instruction with any register (and adressing mode).
      - jrockway 16y ago
        Well, it's a vector math term.

_pius 16y ago

I found the incorrect usage of the word "orthogonal" in the article much more distracting than I'd have expected.

JoshTriplett 16y ago

This change (making bribes legal for the payer, just not the payee) seems highly sensible. Right now, if an official demands a bribe for something you have a right to in the first place, you can attempt to report them, but meanwhile you have to do without, with the associated cost to you. With this change, you can still report the person demanding the bribe, but in the meantime you can choose whether it would cost you less to go ahead and pay the bribe (and hope to get it back later) than to do without whatever you'd needed in the first place. This won't help in all cases, though: as I understand it, some countries (including the US) have laws against paying bribes in other countries, even when such a prohibition effectively prevents doing business in those countries.

alextp 16y ago
Except bribes undermine social fairness significantly. Notice that as the clerk presumably knows how much money he should give you for your tax returns there is a strong incentive for him to ask for a bribe that covers a significant share of your tax returns, effectively making the entire tax return process useless for the citizen. Also, if you think of a slightly different scenario, imagine the office is only allowed to issue X tax returns a month (maybe the money comes in packets), and the bribe is required to cut the line. Now it's really unfair and wrong, and a lot more so for the briber than for the bribee. You should have in mind that it's not actually that hard to bribe people indirectly. Any place with a bribing culture tends to have people you can hire to unofficially bribe some government employee to do something for you. In Brazil these are called "despachantes" (dispatchers), and even though in the last decade or so they have been getting progressively more useless as the country moves away from a bribing culture, you should keep in mind that a lot of despachantes are legally incorporated and even pay taxes. One can't be blamed for hiring that sort of person.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  In Brazil...in the last decade or so they have been getting progressively more useless as the country moves away from a bribing culture... Just curious, could you elaborate on how and why this has occurred? (Moving away from a bribing culture, I mean.) Also, do you think other countries could do the same thing?

duopixel 16y ago

I grew up in Mexico and I can see the logic behind this, I don't think it would work in practice: People usually give bribes when they've done something wrong, not when they are entitled to something. If a clerk asked me for a bribe in exchange for tax refund, I'd demand to talk to his supervisor, and I'm pretty sure he'd shit bricks and pretend to be joking. Let's say I fail a driving test, the clerk insinuates (because it's never obvious) an extra "fee" might help me get my licence: 1. What if the clerk never suggested a bribe, but instead I threatened to accuse him of bribery if he didn't give me a passing score? 2. If he did suggest a bribe, would my licence still be valid? 3. A bribed official would never give you a receipt of your bribery, how are they going to know if what you're saying is true? I can picture trolls affirming they were bribed by thousands of traffic officers in hopes of profitting from a faulty system.

ajays 16y ago
"People usually give bribes when they've done something wrong, not when they are entitled to something." Oh how wrong you are. In India, if you don't bribe, you won't get the service you need and are entitled to. I can give examples, but HN's disks may overflow. For example: to get a passport, you need a certificate of residency (or something like that, it's been a while) from the local police station. Unless you bribe the cops there, they'll never mail it in. Basically, in India, every touchpoint of the government machinery has a bribe slot. If you ever need a service from the government, you need to pay up. It simply does not matter how deserving your case is. There are examples aplenty of old pensioners having to bribe the pension officers to collect their own pensions! Corruption is a cruel system that abuses the most vulnerable and weak in society. The rich can use it to their advantage, and hence they don't care (one neighbor of ours became a multi-millionaire by bribing and selling sub-standard equipment to the Indian Railways ). The poor, on the other hand, get taken advantage of. I have seen, with my own eyes, mothers pawning their wedding jewelry to raise money for bribes so their sons could get a government job. It brought tears to my eyes, and this is why I hate that fucking system with a passion.

phylofx 16y ago

As one commenter on the article pointed out, the scenario described is "extortion", not bribery, so there shouldn't be any legal consequences for the person extorted in such a way anyway. "Most states define extortion as the gaining of property or money by almost any kind of force, or threat of 1) violence, 2) property damage, 3) harm to reputation, or 4) unfavorable government action." bribery is "the receiving or offering any undue reward by or to any person whomsoever, whose ordinary profession or business relates to the administration of public justice, in order to influence his behaviour in office and to incline him to act contrary to his duty and the known rules of honesty and integrity."

eapen 16y ago

In India, it is almost impossible to get something done without giving a bribe and especially if you need something in time. If not, the bribe-expecting government workers will keep you waiting till you are ready to hand over the bribe. I didn't realize it was illegal to give a bribe in India, so I guess I can't even admit to having done that - which is ridiculous! When I needed to get a document in India (in a more rural area), the young government official, who I assumed was above all this corruption, kept telling me to come later (when there were fewer people around) and had me go to a nearby Xerox shop to get copies of a document. While I was going there, the official called the guy at the Xerox shop and told him to tell me how the process works. Suffice to say that I gave something and apparently that wasn't enough, so I had my mom visit him the next day and he made a comment that I hadn't given enough. My mom just smiled, picked up the certificate (which was in front of him) and left. On the other hand, reporting an official is still a bit scary knowing that him or his partners-in-crime can accidentally mess up any of the other official documents and since most of the documents are still on paper and not digitized, it could throw you down into a deeper hole. Unless a massive campaign against corruption is introduced, I dont see this problem going away anytime soon.

wslh 16y ago
Same in Argentina, is how things work.
zaa 16y ago
Basically, this applies to a lot of developing countries (I believe, to Russia, India, Brazil, African countries, etc). USA also has it, but at a bigger scale (think of a politician supporters, the Cenate, etc). Personally, I think bribes in one or another form are just inevitable. It is just a part of human nature.

cheez 16y ago

Yipes, the incentive not to report is high. I don't know that this will do anything.

joe_the_user 16y ago

It's not that clear cut. It seems like whoever has the most leverage and can initiate the transaction should go to jail. Company which offers pay an EPA official ten times their salary to look the other for pollution should be the prosecuted party. But a police officer who extracts a $50 bribe for ignoring a ticket should, on the other hand, wind-up being the one prosecuted.

chrisbennet 16y ago
Read the whole article.

aufreak3 16y ago

I'm left wondering whether such direct intervention of the legal system is the only way to contain the rampant bribery. For instance, what if employment contracts for officials make them agree to an "I will not accept bribes and I understand that I can be fired for doing so" clause, and also a "I hereby declare that have not accepted bribes in the past and understand that I can be fired if it was found to be otherwise". I'm using loose language, but that kind of thing can tie bribes to contract laws and impact the employability anywhere of an official who accepts bribes. To further facilitate evidence collection, it can be made legal to secretly record (as audio/video) transactions solely intended to expose corrupt officials.

archangel_one 16y ago
Surely the fact that accepting bribes is illegal would implictly mean that employees could be fired for doing so? I can't imagine that adding a bit of extra language to the employment contract saying "don't do illegal thing x" is going to stop people from doing it any more than the fact that x is illegal in the first place.
- aufreak3 16y ago
  Adding laws about bribery demands new legal machinery. I was wondering whether the need for that can be bypassed by piggy backing on contract law.
whatusername 16y ago
The point the OP was trying to make is that such legislative changes make it easier to catch bribery (and thus -- it would diminish). If paying you a bribe is illegal -- then I'll do it and cover my tracks. If paying you a bribe is legal and as bonus I get my money back if I rat you out -- then that's awesome for me. But the likely case is -- you wont be asking for that bribe anymore -- as you know it's now a lose/win situation.
gradschool 16y ago
See http://india.5thpillar.org/ZRN http://india.5thpillar.org/ZRN for an innovative approach to fighting bribery. An organization has printed official looking ¨zero rupee notes¨ which people give to officials demanding a bribe, and has reported some success in deterring the practice.

sliverstorm 16y ago

This might even fix the opposite case, where the briber initiates the bribe, and the receiver of the bribe wasn't looking for a bribe. The receiver has to decide, do I refuse knowing that the briber can freely inform the law I accepted his bribe without fear of retribution?

shalinmangar 16y ago

The article assumes that a functioning judicial and investigative system exists which can help you in a reasonable amount of time. If that were the case, bribery wouldn't have become so rampant in the first place. How is one supposed to show evidence of wrongdoing? What keeps the government official from exercising his powers and punishing the reporter in the future?

kolinko 16y ago

This is the way it works in Poland. We had a change in law a couple of years ago exactly due to the reasons you stated. One thing I don't know about our law though - if I try to bribe someone (say - Policeman), and he refuses, can I be prosecuted? I don't know about our law, but it would be interesting if trying to bribe someone would be illegal, but bribing someone was legal.

spindritf 16y ago
> This is the way it works in Poland. Not really. There is an exemption if you inform the law enforcement before they detect it themselves though. > One thing I don't know about our law though - if I try to bribe someone (say - Policeman), and he refuses, can I be prosecuted? Yes, art. 229. k.k. It's not even terribly unlikely that you will get arrested on the spot, '90s are over. IANAL.

grease 16y ago

Not sure this works in all cases. This will work assuming you have money to pay the bribe in the first place. There is no way to protect you from getting asked for a bribe (that you cannot pay).

deleted 16y ago

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srgseg 16y ago

Map of World corruption: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/World_Map_Index_of_perception_of_corruption_2010.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/World_Map... (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index)

yummyfajitas 16y ago
Map of world perception of corruption. It's an important distinction.

teyc 16y ago

That assumes that the government employees are independent of one another and will not "punish" the person reporting the incident. What works better is a system where the PM alone is allowed to take bribes with impunity but no one else is allowed to. The reasoning behind this is it gives the PM and his inner circle sufficient financial independence to implement anti-corruption measures. For example, the central government in China has been known to mete out capital punishments on mid-ranking politicians found to take bribes. This limits the base of people who are able to seek an economic rent on the basis of their position. Like any triangle, the people at the top may get filthy rich and in many sense untouchable; they will be able to keep the large pool of people below them honest.

galadriel 16y ago
This would only work if the top level official wants bribe only for high level project. The approach would fail in India, where every amount of bribe has fixed distribution, from bottom most official to the top. Say for example you wallet got lost, and you need to file an police report. The bribe you pay at police station would not be to the local official alone, but a cut of it would extend all the way over to top till the Home secretary. No one wants to punish anyone in such cases. This allows top-most official to acquire a much larger wealth than they would if they stopped corruption at lower level
- teyc 16y ago
  This type of bribes already occur through taxation, traffic fines and other processing charges. These allow public servants to earn a bonus on top of their normal wages. This is the effect of bribery tainting everybody up the chain. However, if bribery were to be legalised only at the highest level, then the highest leaders will have no incentive to accept bad bribes from their subordinates.

stretchwithme 16y ago

What are they talking about? Bribes ARE legal. All you have to do is call it a campaign contribution. But, yeah, its the politicians that should be prosecuted for taking, not people who are victims of the shakedown. And it is a shakedown when in order to do business in a particular fields all of your competition is already bribing and if you don't, you're screwed. Of course, the reason the politician has power to abuse is that he has power he shouldn't even have. So its really our fault for allowing the concentration of power or believing power is supposed to be concentrated.

Goladus 16y ago
The kind of bribe discussed in the article isn't like a campaign contribution, it's regular people bribing rank-and-file government clerks and police, which happens as a matter of course in India and many other countries.
- stretchwithme 16y ago
  And if you read the rest of my comment, you would see I am aware of that.

angus77 16y ago

I always thought it should be the opposite---paying bribes should be illegal, but accepting them legal. It would be like collecting a reward for turning in the briber.

dchest 16y ago
There's a fatal flaw in this scheme: the person who accepted a bribe is now in position to extort money from the briber forever.
smazero 16y ago
Yeah but this wouldn't address the key problem outlined in the article. The issue this is trying to tackle is that of people being forced to pay bribes for things they are legally, perfectly entitled to. The corruption this is aimed at is the corruption endemic to the civil service/government that it's impossible to avoid in everyday life.
cturner 16y ago
I've never heard of laws working in the way I will describe, but I've got a better algorithm. The crime is this: to (1) participate in bribery and (2) to not be the first party to report it to the authorities. Immediately that the bribe has occurred, a race initiates between the two parties to be the first to register it with the authorities. The bribe money becomes prize money to the winner, with the loser facing consequences.

sagarun 16y ago

The scenario described in the article is not bribe, it is extortion.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

known 16y ago

India cannot be free from corruption unless it disintegrates like USSR.

Deestan 16y ago
It didn't help USSR, though. Corruption is rampant in Russia.
- known 16y ago
  But remaining republics of USSR are relatively free from corruption https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Republics_of_the_Soviet_Union https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Republics_of_...

dchest 16y ago

I like the idea [edit: on a second thought, as commenters pointed out, the described process is extortion, not bribery]. Unfortunately, improvement requires that bribe reporting system is not corrupt (police, courts, etc.), which, I think, is not the case for countries with high corruption rates.

wisty 16y ago
It's easy. Just have make a publicly visible issue tracking system. Issues could be tracked, and punishments recorded (if applicable). You could put a little bit of identity protection in (i.e. Officer 123 vs Customer 345).
- dchest 16y ago
  Records: - Customer 345 reported a bribe. - Officer 123 has been cleaned from false reporting. Non-records: Customer 345 thrown into jail for possession of drugs.

known 16y ago

In India, bribe is considered as a tip that we give to waiter/waitress in US. http://truthaboutindiacorruption.org/ http://truthaboutindiacorruption.org/

sandstrom 16y ago

Although prostitution and bribes isn't that related, I know Sweden did something similar — the supply side of prostitution is legal but buying isn't. From what I know I think it has worked fairly well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden#Purchasing_sex_.28Brottsbalk_6.11.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden#Purchasi... I know something similar is also used for collusion in the US, where a party that is first to snitch can avoid prosecution. Although there are undoubtedly other ways of curbing corruption, e.g. competition between agencies driving down bribes to zero (in theory at least), this could work.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
Something I've never understood. People advocate to make only the buying side of prostitution illegal. The same people often advocate to make only the selling side of drugs illegal. It's a weird dichotomy I can't wrap my head around. (I realize that some people may favor only one of these policies, but I don't think the intersection of people favoring both is empty.)
- cturner 16y ago
  I was thinking about last night. I see logic in it. (1) Target the people who you have best hope of affecting the behaviour of. (2) Avoiding compounding damage to people who are already messed up. Prostitution attracts girls who are already degraded. It's common for the girls to have been sexually abused as a child, physically abused as a young wife, or to have drug issues. Participation in the trade suggests that the person is not a full-functioning citizen. A motivation for outlawing prostitution is paternalistic: it's a dynamic that causes this a concentrated group of people with existing problems to spiral further. Using the legal system to target people in that situation for their own good is counterproductive. They have low faith in government and institutions already, and jailing them probably isn't going to help that. You just end up pushing them into and out of new institutions, but they keep practicing because the business is there and they don't take control of their lives to rise out of it. Whereas the business that fuels prostitution is vulnerable to the dynamic of the police and legal system. Users are usually people who are full participants in society and are vulnerable to shame and the threat of jail time. They generally have a good understanding of rights/responsibility even if they have periods where they hold themselves to be above it. I sometimes read that prostitution is "misogynistic". It's not. For the most part the users don't think about the circumstances of the girls at all. Some people don't naturally behave with concern for other people's circumstance, and the stick attempts to compensate for that.

Goladus 16y ago

In US Culture, there's still plenty of reason to discourage people from offering bribes. Offering bribes encourages corruption. The victims of a bribe in the US are typically everyone BUT the briber and the collector. If you're at a restaurant and bribe a maitre d' to bump up your priority for a table, he pockets some cash you get your table and all the people following the rules get boned. The briber is not being exploited at all. This scenario is probably not illegal and certainly not a big deal, but is a good example of the way our cultural rules usually work. In a place like India, where it's typical for government workers to expect bribes and refuse service without it, or for police to hassle people about trivial things like whether the mirror on your bike is adjusted properly, it's really more appropriately called extortion. The victims are the people paying the 'bribes.' The only one who really benefits is the collector. In that case it makes more sense to focus on solving the problem from that angle.