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Moscow Times
July 30, 2004
Editorial
Open Season for Sloth and Sleaze
A groundbreaking experiment in bureaucratic incentives is being conducted this summer by the Putin administration -- though at whose expense and for whose benefit is not immediately clear.
Having launched an ambitious-sounding overhaul of the government and the country's sluggish and corruption-prone bureaucracy back in March, it transpires that a few minor details were overlooked in the rush and the excitement. In a suitably ironic display of bureaucratic incompetence, officials in many of the new ministries, agencies and services created in the spring revamp have not been paid their salaries for a couple months and are unlikely to be before the fall.
It's certainly a novel method for raising efficiency and rooting out corruption -- the proclaimed aims of the reform. It sounds much more like an open invitation to officials (as if they needed one) to seek out alternative sources of remuneration, exploiting their official positions to line their own pockets.
President Vladimir Putin has delivered rousing speeches of late to various sections of the bureaucracy, appealing to them to work harder and take more initiative -- most recently to the country's ambassadors and to the top brass of the law enforcement and security services. His calls for "selfless service to duty and to the people," however, are likely to fall on deaf ears.
Indeed his appeal this week to the law enforcement community, "to pay special attention to halting corruption and defending business, particularly small and medium-sized business, from criminal pressure," was richly comical, given that the police and other state agencies are probably the worst offenders when it comes to shaking down businesses and milking them dry.
Though to give the administration its due, when it really matters the Kremlin has been known to find ways to align bureaucratic interests with the state's agenda. Take Yukos, for example, and the cool $235 million "fee" the court marshals will pick up for the trouble of collecting the oil major's $3.4 billion tax debts -- a chunk of which, by law, can go straight into court marshals' pockets.
But if the Putin administration is serious about achieving improvements across the board -- not just stimulating efficiency in a strictly selective fashion -- it must properly remunerate officials, as well as establishing a credible threat of punishment for corruption and incompetence. Few officials are ever held to account, particularly if they are part of Putin's "charmed circle."
The existing bureaucratic incentive structure only encourages rent-seeking activities, dysfunctional government and chaos. Sounds much more like the Yeltsin years than the shiny new "power vertical" of the Putin era.