Ameha Diana, director general of Selam Development Consultants Plc,
left, and Wedo Atto, the deputy Commissioner of FEACC during the
presentation on Thursday, January 23, 2014.
The first draft of the World
Bank sponsored corruption study comes out pointing fingers at petty
corruption in various government institutions, while playing down the
impact of grand corruption.
The power, tax, investment and transport sectors have been identified
as having the highest level of corruption, according to a draft finding
by a study under the Federal Ethics & Anti-Corruption Commission
(FEACC).
Employees of the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo) have
been identified by the study as being frontrunners in asking for
unofficial payments, with an average of 10 bribe requests for a single
respondent in the study. The EEPCo is also the organisation with the
highest average number of foreign companies seeking its services.
Traffic police, on the other hand, have asked more of the respondents
for bribes than any of the entities surveyed, according to the report.
The draft report, which included the responses of 350 foreign
investors, took two and half months to produce. The final report is
expected to be released a month after the World Bank approves its
finalisation according to the guidelines.
“Around 16.6pc of the respondents reported a total count of 370
requests with an average of six bribe demands per respondent,” said the
draft study released on Thursday, January 25, 2014, at the Hilton Hotel,
under the title “Perception of the Level of Corruption by Foreign
Investors in Ethiopia”.
Six percent of the respondents also reported that employees of the
Ethiopian Revenues & Customs Authority (ERCA) had asked them for
money- a total count of 54 times for customs licenses and 49 times for
tax inspection.
The findings of the draft study, nevertheless, indicated that grand
corruption is not a threat to Ethiopia, as none of the respondents
reported confronting it.
“Petty corruptions exist in almost every office,” said Ameha Diana,
director general of Selam Development Consultants Plc, which conducted
the survey. “With only some institutions standing out in level of
corruption, Ethiopia is freer than several other countries as far as
corruption is concerned.”
Judges and court officials, employees of standards and safety
offices, those in the water and sewerage agency and the state
telecommunications company, ethio telecom, have also been identified as
asking for bribes.
Employees involved with customs and trade licenses, land acquisition,
licensing authorities and tax agencies, as well as government
procurement have not been immune to allegations of bribery. The results
reveal that employees in these agencies are collecting bribe money
ranging from 5,000 to 7,000 Br.
“These employees can get paid a maximum bribe of 20,000 to 50,000 Br,” the draft study said.
“The Commission’s strategic focus areas are taxation and revenue
collection, the justice sector, procurement in major infrastructural
projects, land administration and financial management,” Wedo Atto, the
deputy Commissioner, said in his opening remark at the launching of the
draft study.
Back in 2012, the second nationwide corruption survey, which was
commissioned by the Commission and conducted by a Tanzanian-based US
company, Kilimanjaro International Corporation (KIC), disclosed that a
considerable number of the public had to make extra payments in the form
of gratification to public institutions..
The judiciary, law enforcement community, municipalities and the ERCA
were identified as the places most people perceived as being prone to
corruption and inefficient public service delivery, according to that
survey.
The Commission, nevertheless, wants more than one research to point
to similar problems before it takes any measures, says Berhanu Assefa,
Director of Ethics Education & Communication Affairs.
The World Bank (WB), Department for International Development (DFID),
Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Canadian
International Development Agency (CIDA) collaborated with the FEACC in
conducting the latest survey.
ምንጭ፦ http://addisfortune.net/articles/petty-corruption-rife-in-ethiopia/
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