Corruption

Today's waking thought took as its text an anecdote about a supplier to the public service being invited to pop some money into someone's private account to ensure that he got the contract.

I was very firm at the time that very little of that sort of thing went on in the UK and this morning I got to wondering about that firmness. What protection do we have in the UK against the public procurement process being corrupted in this way?

For one, it is illegal. I think that it is illegal to offer this sort of bribe and it is illegal to accept one. So anyone making such an offer would need to be careful about to whom he made it. There would need to be some warming up, maybe a few drinks to soften up the ambience. It would be easy to get it wrong and find oneself struck out of this particular public procurement, if not worse.

For two, government, in general terms anyway, only buys from respectable companies with proper accounts. So a bribing company would need to be able to hide any bribe in its accounts. Maybe companies have off-account cash funds which they can draw on for such purposes. Funds which could, for example, be built up by inflating the salary of the cash fund holder. But such expedients are probably illegal too and in any event would get more difficult as the amount of the bribe got larger.

For three, government procurement is supposed to be open. This means that anyone can play and a seriously corrupt supplier is apt to be undercut on price by an honest supplier. It also means that the procurement process is set out in public and includes both a requirement and an evaluation model, which complicates the task of the recipient of the bribe, even if he or she is leading the procurement,

One way around this one, and the example which comes to mind, as it happens, was a procurement of snow clearing machinery in Ottawa, is to include in the requirement a feature which you know that only the desired company can meet, at least in the short term. Naturally such a feature would have to be introduced into the procurement at an early stage and would have to be sensible. Any old joke feature would not do. Maybe the would be briber could help the wannabee bribee out here?

Another way around this one is to supply shoddy goods and trust the bribee to turn a blind eye until it was all too late. The catch here is that this would probably require the bribee to involve others, reducing his take and increasing the risk of detection.

By which time I am fully awake and decide that this can all be left to the wizards of public procurement (often well-paid contractors themselves, as it happens), happy in the thought that while they might have their problems, they are probably not to do with corruption. There are plenty of other things to go wrong.