Tighten public cash controls to fight graft

Lately, there have been rising cases of public service workers’ bank accounts being frozen after their holders were unable to account for their wealth.

In some cases, junior civil servants have been reported as owning fleets of luxurious cars, parcels of prime land and real estate investments that were not commensurate with their pay and business engagements.

The visibility of these cases is partly attributable to a commendable job by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, the Assets Recovery Authority (ARA) and other agencies that are tasked with enforcement of laws relating to economic crimes.

That said, these cases also point to the possibility that many other culprits escape the radar of the anti-corruption watchdogs either because these agencies had insufficient evidence to sustain a lawsuit or they lacked adequate resources to handle all the cases that beeped on their radar screen.

The corollary is that while the relevant agencies might be doing a fantastic job of ensuring that corruptly obtained wealth is traced and forfeited to the public, billions could still be getting lost through crooked public procurement systems and outright theft of public funds.

To complement the good work that ARA, EACC and other agencies are doing, there is a need for a paradigm shift from reactive to proactive strategies. It would be more desirable and cost-effective to stop those bent on stealing public funds in their tracks instead of waiting until the funds are stolen for the tracing and recovery processes to start.

The government needs to fund the relevant agencies adequately to enable them to go beyond tracing stolen wealth to implementing programmes geared towards preventing economic crimes.

Soft strategies such as sensitising the public on the effects of economic crimes to public welfare and having anti-corruption content strategically integrated into the school curriculum would also go a long way in bolstering the war on corruption.