Bribery

Bribery is an interesting thing. You, at least I, typically associate bribery with large corporations or with political candidates. I ran across an article on Yahoo tonight that enlightened me to the fact that it is a much larger and more pervasive issue than I had anticipated. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica website bribery is defined as “the act of promising, giving, receiving, or agreeing to receive money or some other item of value with the corrupt aim of influencing a public official in the discharge of official duties. When money has been offered or promised in exchange for a corrupt act, the official involved need not actually accomplish that act for the offense of bribery to be complete. The crime is typically punishable as a felony.”

Overall bribery doesn't seem to be a major and pervasive issue in the United States (or maybe I'm just clueless here) but in many foreign countries such as India or Bangladesh it is a pervasive and far reaching issue. For example in this article I found there are examples given such as to claim a legitimate tax refund in Hyderabad, India is 10,000 rupees. And that it will run you 20,000 shillings to get your child who has already met the admission requirements into High School in Nairobi, Kenya. If I didn't spend as much time as I do randomly reading articles on the internet I might be more surprised about how rampant bribery is among public officials in some of the middle eastern countries. But since I spend a fair amount of time unable or unwilling to sleep I read way, way too many articles online and was not surprised.

In fact a week or so ago I stumbled across the website I Paid A Bribe which was founded in August 2010 by Ramesh and Ms. Ramanathan along with Sridar Iyengar. It was set up with the purpose of being a forum if you will, to demonstrate how prevalent bribery is and give the people an anonymous way to vocalize their true feelings regarding bribery without fear of reprisal. The main page actually features new bribe reports as well as ones that have been voted most popular. There is even a scrolling feed of legal advice on one side of the page. When I clicked over a moment ago the newest posted bribe was from a streetwalker in Mumbai that when she decided to visit relatives in Canada was told she was too ugly for the shutter mechanism to work until she paid a bribe to get her passport photo taken. I've already spent a fair amount of time browsing through the different bribe reports, you never know what you'll see.

I personally am not a fan of bribery and find the policy of doing so to be very corrupt and dishonest. I think there should be a way to stop bribery and make things fair for all across any given country/the world. Also a point from my Economics class, bribery hurts international trade as the countries that engage in bribery must figure those costs into their trade costs which makes trade more expensive for them in the long run.