Time to adopt TI Integrity Pact

On Sunday July 6, you published the last of an excellent series of reports on the 170 days of public hearings of the Airport Inquiry. There should now be little doubt in your readers’ minds that a lot went wrong in the Airport Project. After the Commission’s report is published there should be no doubt at all in anyone’s mind. And we should have a much better understanding of how things can go wrong in any project where public money — our money — is being spent. So we must now ask, if we haven’t asked before, “What can be done to prevent such abuses?” The first thing that can be done is to punish any wrongdoers. If this is done justly and fairly, with all due process, it will be a powerful deterrent. We need to turn corruption and mismanagement of public funds into high risk occupations. Another thing to do is reform the public procurement system in such a way that no-one entrusted with public funds will be free to spend any of those funds outside the control of clear, properly enforced laws, rules and procedures. In the case of the Airport Project it appears that there was at times too much discretion allowed to individuals or groups whose actions were not always monitored effectively. There seems to have been, at times, a considerable lack of transparency and accountability. At the symposium on Transparent Public Procurement held by the Trinidad and Tobago Transparency Institute (TTTI) in April, we learned that, under the present system, State owned enterprises for example can in effect, spend public money without the oversight of a body such as the Central Tenders Board. Some would justify this in the name of efficiency, but the airport project shows how it can be abused. What we need is a system that includes all projects involving public funds and, provides as much control as the complexity of the project requires yet, not so much as to tie up the process in red tape.
 
A difficult balance to achieve, but one to which Governments in many countries-including our own-are working. When opening our symposium, Ms Alison Lewis, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Finance spoke of Government’s commitment to uphold ”...the highest standards of integrity in public life...” To fulfill this commitment, it had “...embarked on a number of reforms, one of which is Financial Management Reform.” She described this as “...a comprehensive reform effort which will have far reaching consequences, since it involves systemic changes to ensure, among other things, we get value for money....” The reform, she said,”...is intended to enhance the ability of line managers to manage more effectively by giving them the opportunity to do so more flexibly but in the context of full transparency and accountability.” During the symposium discussions, a technical officer of the Ministry of Finance explained some of the options that Government is considering for reforming public procurement. She expected that the work being done on these issues would soon enter the public domain. We are looking forward eagerly to the results of this work. Publication of serious proposals for reform will reassure the public of Government’s commitment, and provide all stakeholders with the opportunity to discuss and help improve these proposals.

TTTI’s project is to promote such discussion and so contribute to reform. So we urge the Government not to delay much longer in sharing their proposals with the nation. A third thing is to build special safeguards against corruption, into the procedures of one or two major public projects and monitor these projects in such a way as to ensure that they are corruption free. This, in essence is what Transparency International’s (TI’s) Integrity Pact does. Under a legally enforceable agreement.
* tenderers undertake not to offer or pay any bribes in connection with the contract;
* the public authority on its part commits itself to prevent extortion and the acceptance of bribes by its officials, and to follow transparent procurement rules;
* all parties agree to the application of specific sanctions for violations of the Pact;
* disputes are resolved through international or, where appropriate, national arbitration;
* all steps in the process are monitored by an independent body; and
* there is extensive and easy public access to all relevant information.

Participants at our symposium generally agreed that, using this tool — which does not have to wait on new laws being passed — could go a long way to restoring public confidence in public institutions. It would reassure suppliers that there can actually be such as a thing as a level playing field. It would set directions for reforms that could eventually render Integrity Pacts unnecessary. Most discussions of corruption tend to concentrate more on bribe taking than on bribe giving. But in procurement, as in all transactions “one hand can’t clap.” We must do what we can to discourage suppliers of goods and services from offering bribes. Better anti-corruption legislation, such as what could be drafted by the proposed independent Commission Against Corruption, should help here. In the meantime, we can work with the private sector suppliers to develop a corporate culture that prohibits the offering of bribes. TI has developed a set of `Business Principles for Countering Bribery’ that we propose to discuss with the business community. These are some of the things that can be done to bring greater integrity to the way Government and the Private Sector do business. The Enquiry findings should be of great help to those who seek to do them.