Cats and Mice: The Sisyphean Chase to Prevent Government Corruption

On (De)centralizing Corruption or its Prevention

Over the last 7 years as a data scientist and IT generalist within the government, I've been involved with multiple technological top-down attempts of preventing fraud across departments. Key word preventing, as I've learned early on, that identifying fraud that has already happened has few takers.

Technology or data science is often leveraged within the government to prevent fraud from happening or for increasing legibility at the cost of increasing administrative burden. Even when we fix one leak, it seems like another one pops up elsewhere. So, if we narrow our focus to specific forms of leakage, many interventions seem successful but if broaden the system boundary, I am unsure if the overall system's leakages have reduced to the extent desired. A senior technocrat once explained to me that corruption is like matter, you can't destroy it. You'll plug a leak and it'll take a new form. It will mutate or displace but it won't be destroyed.

Eg There is a subsidy program wherein beneficiaries to be given money to buy certain goods. In the cash regime, it was noticed that the distributing officer kept a cut with them and disbursed less money than as mentioned in policy. The government decides to directly transfer money into the beneficiary’s bank account thereby reducing leakage. This should work, right? But now the officer will take money in advance from the beneficiary before the whole amount is transferred directly into your bank account. Or the cut may be moved elsewhere in the supply chain. Say at the time of entering your name of the beneficiary in the list of recipients.

Although, I've not done enough years to warrant this cynicism as compared the technocrat earlier, my optimism in technology cyclically wavers, as it should.

Often quoted by insiders and in research, preventing fraud is a cat and mouse game signifying the constant lively chase between the people trying to prevent corruption (upper level bureaucrats) and the one’s being corrupt downstream.

This description poorly paints the fight as fair. Instead of a balanced lively match, the cat is over-burdened, aging and operates with a limited toolbox in Delhi, whereas the mice are many, decentralized and many rabid.

Take any central intervention to fraud prevention initiative and you'll be surprised by the creativity and diversity at work in bypassing it. Obviously, technical interventions make it harder for someone to bypass rules, but in doing so you make the system hard for everyone involved including those who were being honest. Increasing administrative burdens mixed with overworked capacity will push even the honest ones into breaking rules. (This is something we term Counterproductive Computing in this paper, which I am hoping to do a post on later)

The problem with centralized approaches to prevent fraud is that fraud is decentralized, more agile, has better capacity and creativity. Centralized approaches also are standardized, work with limited information and often toothless.

So what do you try then?

Let's see.

So, we've seen centralized mechanisms fail against decentralized corruption. What if we centralize corruption? We can deliberately shape mechanisms such that corruption moves higher up in the chain thereby reducing the number of bad actors. This might decrease interfaces of corruption and thereby making it more amenable to standardized centralized fraud prevention mechanisms from Delhi. Arguably, by centralizing it a little, you reduce the variance in strategies employed by the corrupt as well.

The Direct Benefit Transfer example I provided earlier may be a good example of centralizing corruption to an extent. Earlier, money would disbursed in cash by the field functionaries say at the Panchayat level. With DBT, the act of disbursement is moved up further to the Block Level Officer who approves the transfer on her Management Information System. There are ~6000 Blocks and therefore Block Level Officers making this decision as opposed to ~250,000 Panchayats. I think US might be another example of centralized corruption which could be further examined.

What about decentralized mechanisms to prevent decentralized corruption?
If the fraud is decentralized, we need to decentralize the ability to catch it too. This isn't news, people favoring local government/democracy have been saying this for long. The closer accountability is to the physical manifestation of governance, the better. Village A may be facing a different kind of fraud than Village B. The villagers in those respective villages will be better equipped at preventing their kind of fraud than someone in Delhi trying to identify patterns.

Well, why aren't the villagers doing it already with much success? It isn't that extant hot favorite centralized approaches are competing with decentralized approaches. Well, maybe they are. I think centralization efforts have weakened decentralized capacities. As more and more governance shifted to MIS, two things have happened. First ironically, an information asymmetry has been created by digitization wherein information that could be accessed locally on paper is now locked within logins or public reporting labyrinths. Truly, information is being managed. Secondly, the ability to rectify mistakes or positively adapt processes locally has been removed as centralized MIS have to standardize processes and cannot incorporate nuances if they have to serve all parts of the country (Delhi Aur Developer Dur Hai)

How do you then decentralize mechanisms to prevent fraud using technology? In my experience, I've found that opening up data is the least controversial method of democratizing anti-corruption efforts. It's simple: sunlight is the best disinfectant, and there's plenty of it. One can argue, RTI did more for the cause than a million mobile apps and MIS validations. Public on the ground while closer to the site of corruption, still suffer from a power dynamic with the local state. Data or technology should be used to address this power imbalance. Opening data or freeing information has a great multiplier effect as well. Extending the cat-mouse analogy before, opening data and empowering the public is akin to have your own diverse cat army on the ground.

More broadly, any move that empowers people to hold the state accountable should be encouraged. Another example is empowering social-audits. Many argue social-audits often don’t lead to meaningful outcomes. Can technology provide more legibility here?

The elite bureaucracy often sees preventing leakages as their exclusive domain. While camps are vehemently split into the role of the state and the market in different activities, I've been coming to the conclusion that the role of keeping the state accountable is better served by the market of local pressures or more simply by the people. While, the state should be making policies and establishing frameworks of regulating itself, I believe the role of keeping the state itself accountable is a ripe case for publicisation

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