How much corruption do you think takes place where you work? Most Norwegians think corruption is something that only happens in poor countries. If there’s any corruption in Norway, it’s certainly not at their workplace.
In Norway we live in a bubble where corruption doesn’t exist. We score 90 out of 100 points on Transparency Internationals index over perceived corruption, which means that in our inhabitants’ eyes, there’s very little corruption going on. Meanwhile, large Norwegian organizations like Statoil, DNB (The Norwegian Bank) and Bærum County (to mention just a few) have all been found guilty of corruption. Each year over 130 billion Norwegian Kroner about 23,5 billion US dollars is lost due to cheating on taxes, fees and welfare alone.
Not just a problem for poor countries
Western countries generally have a lower percentage of GDP lost to corruption than poor countries in Asia or Africa. According to corruption hunter Nigel Krishna Iyer, however, western countries still lose more money to corruption than one would expect. Even though there’s a high level of corruption in Nigeria, more money is lost to corruption in Great Britain due to higher income levels. Because of this, even western countries would have a lot to gain by fighting corruption.
Ineffective regulation
A lot of companies put a lot of effort into nice looking videos and brochures where they try to influence their employees to act justly. A lot of rules, standard contracts and regulations aimed at countering corruption have also been made. According to corruption hunter Iyer, these measures are ineffective. When an employee has to choose between potentially huge profits and a video where the CEO goes on about the company’s values, it’s often not a difficult choice.
Know your enemy
How do you fight corruption? You have to know your enemy. If employees in both large corporations and small companies were taught how to uncover and report corruption, half of the work would already be done. Unfortunately, this kind of knowledge is uncommon, since most people don’t think corruption is something that happens at their company.
The universities haven’t been up to the task, either. NTNU (Norwegian University of Technology and Natural Science) in Trondheim thinks the basic philosophy course «ex.phil» is sufficient. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether knowledge about Plato’s cave allegory or Kant’s ethics are useful tools for uncovering and fighting tax evasion and bribery.
17 February 2013
