Experts exchange anti-corruption experiences
HA NOI — International and domestic experts gathered in Ha Noi yesterday to share anti-corruption experiences and discuss criteria used to assess corruption.
They agreed that corruption had become a global issue which had grown and had a negative effect on many aspects of society, hindering the development of each country and increasing the gap between rich and poor.
Defining the criteria to properly assess the real state of corruption was essential to creating appropriate mechanisms, policies and solutions to the issue, said Chief of the Secretariat of the Office of Central Steering Committee for Anti-Corruption Vu Tien Chien.
It was also necessary to define the responsibilities of relevant ministries and agencies and conditions needed to ensure effective implementation of those criteria and anti-corruption work, he said.
Sharing anti-corruption experience from China, Deputy Director of the General Office of National Bureau of Corruption Prevention of China Yu Xian Cheng said the country had established an anti-corruption bureau which focused on the fight against corruption in specific areas, including increasing education and information dissemination about related laws, policies and anti-corruption measures through the media, internet, reports and hotlines.
"Building an anti-corruption mechanism and promoting the implementation of pilot anti-corruption projects in State-owned enterprises and agencies, and focusing on vulnerable fields, are also essential," he said.
"The country has also actively studied and invested in anti-corruption measures, seeking initiatives and sharing information by building an information and early warning system to prevent corruption," he added.
The country also mobilised the participation of the public by collecting their opinions and enhancing international co-operation in this field to make the work more effective, he said.
Sung-kwon Park, Director General of Anti-corruption Bureau of South Korea, said the country's anti-corruption policies focused on improving the efficiency of corruption-prone institutions by abolishing unnecessary regulations to make administrative process more transparent and setting up an inspection system to discover and corruption cases.
"An anti-corruption agency was established to develop and disseminate anti-corruption policies and evaluate anti-corruption efforts made by public organisations," he said.
Integrity assessments and an audit of anti-corruption initiatives also played an important role in effectively managing an anti-corruption system, he said, adding that integrity assessments were a system with which service-users of public agencies assessed the level of corruption and corruption-prone areas of public agencies.
Regarding criteria for corruption assessment in Viet Nam, Pham Anh Tuan, Deputy Chief of the Secretariat of the Office of the Anti-Corruption Central Steering Committee, said the office has mapped out six basic criteria, including the level of finalising corruption prevention and control institutions and implementation results of preventive measures and the number of discovered corruption cases.
Other criteria included self-assessment of agencies, organisations and units and assessment of authorised related agencies; results from public opinion surveys and media information; results of socio-economic development, political stability and social order; and assessment of some international organisations.
Concerning measuring and monitoring corruption and anti-corruption measures, Juanita Riano from the Transparency International (TI) - a global coalition against corruption provided a briefing on corruption assessment tools at an international level; including a corruption perceptions index (CPI), global corruption barometer (GCB) and bribe payers index (BPI).
CPI is an aggregated survey that measures the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians and it reflects views of experienced observers such as country analysts and business people.
Based on the index, country scores on a scale from ten (very clean) to zero (very corrupt).
Viet Nam's CPI score in 2009 was 2.7, ranking 120th out of 180 surveyed countries and territories.
During the 2007-09 period, the country took legal proceedings against 1,063 cases of corruption.
"Its purpose is to provide a snapshot view for decision-makers, to raise public awareness of corruption, bring corruption to public debate and serve as a stimulus for new research," she said.
GCB is a public opinion survey measuring people's experience of corruption or how corruption affects the daily life of ordinary citizens.
It is aimed at raising public awareness, supplementing expert views on corruption, allowing sub-analysis in terms of income, age and gender, and identifying sectors perceived to be most corrupt.
BPI is a ranking of 22 of the world's wealthiest and most economically influential countries according to the likelihood of their firms to use bribery abroad. It is used to assess the international "supply side" of corruption.
As part of absorbing the mechanisms used to measure corruption, she said it was essential to focus assessments on the effectiveness of policies, public opinion and experience and develop a tracking system and risk map to identify results because it was difficult to establish a correlation between the number of cases revealed and the real situation. — VNS