Corruption and State Auditing: the Politics of Indignation

Corruption, like the weather, is a matter about which there is a good deal of talk. And like the weather, most people have little faith that anything can be done about it. At first blush, this lack of faith might be corroborated by incessant media reports of transnational, cross-cultural hanky-panky. While recent studies would link corruption to low levels of political consciousness, ambiguous or contradictory norms, conflicting loyalties, or poor administrative techniques, the appearance of corruption in diverse political and legal systems belies any simple functional explanation.1 In East and West, in advanced technological societies and in underdeveloped agricultural regions, in centralized bureaucracies and in federated systems of control, under conditions of intense ideological mobilization like those in China or in cultures which foster individualism as in the United States of America, the violation of the public trust by public servants is far from rare.2 The art of public administration notwithstanding, human venality seems to triumph.