Bureaucratic Corruption In Singapore

Bureaucratic corruption is firstly defined as the “abuse of public power by an individual in the bureaucracy or political leadership for the private benefit of the individual or the individual’s party, class, tribe, friends or family” (Nye, 1967). Singapore had been extremely successful in tackling bureaucratic corruption from 1965 – 2005. From a country that was rife with corruption during its pre-independence days, Singapore has since become the least corrupt Asian country in the world (Quah, 2006).

Nevertheless, the last ten years have posed a series of new challenges for the Singapore government to face. Acts of corruption have become harder to detect with increasing interaction between the public and private domain and increasing managerial

The state-backed media enterprises (Singapore Press Holdings, Mediacorp) do not hold back from naming and shaming corrupt public officers, even if they used to be in positions of considerable power. This leads to an outpouring of anger among the Singapore public, who view it as a severe betrayal of public trust. The importance of creating this negative social stigma is best encapsulated by Lee Kuan Yew: “the strongest deterrent (to corruption) is in a public opinion which censures and condemns corrupt persons, in other words, in attitudes which make corruption so unacceptable that the stigma of corruption cannot be washed away by serving a prison sentence" (Straits Times, 2015). In some cases, the shame of the public official is so great that he chooses to end his own life. This was witnessed in 1986 when Teh Cheang Wan, a former PAP Member of Parliament, committed suicide after being investigated for bribery

Despite the increased susceptibility of bureaucratic corruption in recent years, I nevertheless maintain that the government has still been highly effective in its anti-corruption methods. The high profile incidents demonstrated that no matter the rank and position of the bureaucrat, he can still be tried and convicted under the law while whistle-blowers are simultaneously protected from corporate backlash. It is a testament to the strength and impartiality of the anti-corruption institutions already in place. Furthermore with the government embarking on NPM reforms by giving bureaucrat managers more autonomy over financial matters; an inevitable trade-off would be increased opportunities to misappropriate funds for one’s private benefit. While the government can implement a more rigorous series of checks and balances to keep corruption at bay, it cannot account for an individual’s greed. Integrity is after all a subjective characteristic that is impossible to measure, and a façade that one can easily put