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6/2004 |
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[ Corruption ]
Organised irresponsibility
All development policy practitioners sooner or later come up against corruption. Nonetheless, it remains a subject which is not talked about. Georg Cremer, secretary general of Caritas International, wonders how much the implementing organisations actually want to know. Staff at the grassroots usually know more than the management. But they have no opportunity of passing on their knowledge and effecting changes. Behind it all lurks the fear that whoever exposes misuse of funds and tells the donor (in Germany this is mainly the Ministry for Development), may have to pay the money back.
Governmental organisations don’t cut a much better figure. At a conference of the Protestant Academy of Bad Boll in April, Ralf Orlik of the KfW development bank reported that internal auditors of his institution check all items of expenditure and usually manage to track down any kind of misappropriation of funds. According to Joachim Menze of the European Commission, this view is a little too optimistic. He argues that internal auditors only check that the actual figures are correct and are, therefore, hardly in a position to identify any misappropriation. For this reason, the EU maintains a special anti-fraud office called OLAF (Office de Lutte Anti-Fraude), which employs a staff of 350. The KfW does not have a comparable facility, for the state-owned bank the task is vaguely “handled by management”. It’s also true, however, that OLAF has a crucial weakness. While all EU employees are obliged to co-operate with this authority, the employees of national administrations are not. And they are the ones who spend the money.
Employees of Church agencies face special difficulties. Their professionals are usually employed by a local partner organisation; in the case of the Catholic Church this is the local bishop. Their contact is the head of staff of their sending agency, but this person is not responsible for carrying out the project. The funds come from another, such as Misereor, to which they have no organisational links. The result is that if an employee comes across any corruption he or she does not have any contact to notify. Generally speaking the protestant churches are no better organised.
The churches have long talked their way out of facing up to the problem by saying that religiously motivated partners are particularly trustworthy. But it is hardly a new phenomenon that corruption, embezzlement and nepotism also occur in church organisations. Often it’s a result of the fact that partners do not possess the necessary management competencies such as accounting. Despite this fact, training is not seen as a priority. Often the local partners are not aware of the meaning of the word “appropriation”. Funds are then used for such items as building a house for the local priest or for financing the agency’s organisation. This kind of thing is understandable because local bodies usually have no resources of their own to fund such projects. All these issues need to be openly debated, but instead a cloak of secrecy is thrown over them. Several participants of the conference in Bad Boll, however, do not intend to leave the situation as it is; they have announced that they will be devoting increased time and energy to this matter in future.
Reinold E. Thiel
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