9 REDUCING CORRUPTION
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are now internet users. Moreover, among the five countries with the most internet users, four are developing countries: China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. Moreover, the proportion of their citizens who pay bribes to use public services is well above the global average (see Appendix Fig. A.1). Monitor the delivery of services electronically. Corruption and fraud often go together. For example, public officials who collect bribes are also more likely to defraud their agency by not being in their office for all the hours that they are meant to be at work. A teacher may be at home providing privately paid tuition for select pupils while most of the class loses lessons because of the teacher’s absenteeism. Traditional methods of time-keeping, such as signing a time sheet or punching a time clock, can be done by friends of an absent employee. Where attendance is slack, a public agency can install online biometric monitors in public offices. Instead of signing in manually, employees must then be physically present to register their biometric data for verification by checking with computerized data at the agency’s headquarters. Corruption in India is exacerbated by large-scale illiteracy and a lack of basic records for identification; individuals can make multiple claims for benefits and officials pocket payments in the name of beneficiaries who do not exist. To deal with these problems the Indian government has enrolled a billion people in Aadhaar, a unique system of biometric identification based on computerized evidence of an individual’s fingerprints and eye scans. The data is being used to authorize payments of cash benefits and to monitor whether public employees show up for work (Nilekani and Shah 2016; Muralidharan et al. 2016). Give citizens access to public records about themselves. The great majority of ordinary citizens are not interested in gaining access to information about how their government makes decisions about capital-intensive contracts remote from their lives. However, they do have an interest in gaining access to public records about how public officials go about delivering retail services that they want. Public officials routinely create computer files about requests they receive from individuals and the action that has or has not been taken. Opening up access to personal files can enable people to learn what is happening while they are kept waiting in a long queue or denied a permit to build a house. If the record indicates that sloth is the cause, then an aggrieved person may issue a wake-up call to prompt action by a dilatory public servant. If there is a strong suspicion that bribery was the cause, then a person faces the choice between accepting rejection or paying a bribe.
