Preventing corruption within government procurement: Constructing the disciplined and ethical subject

This article investigates the performance determinants of accountability institutions in new democracies. Current scholarship on accountability has identified a distinct mechanism through which the introduction of political competition may affect such institutions: the electoral connection or vertical accountability mechanism. This connection is not expected to be effective in new democracies, because political competition is found to be volatile and nonprogrammatic. Another strand of the literature focuses on the effect of power alternation. Government turnover is expected to generate incentives for the creation and strengthening of autonomous institutions. By exploring a unique data set on 33 state audit institutions, the authors bring together these distinct claims and provide systematic empirical tests for them. They find a negative effect of volatility on their institutional activism and a positive (direct and indirect) influence of power alternation on their levels of autonomy and sanctioning patterns.

Political and Institutional Checks on Corruption: Explaining the Performance of Brazilian Audit Institutions

Why corruption matters: understanding causes, effects and how to address them. Evidence paper on corruption.

This paper charts the current evidence on effectiveness of different anti-corruption reforms, and identifies significant evidence gaps. Despite a substantial amount of literature on corruption, this review found very few studies focusing on anti-corruption reforms, and even fewer that credibly assess issues of effectiveness and impact.
 
The evidence was strong for only two types of interventions: public financial management (PFM) reforms and supreme audit institutions (SAIs). For PFM, the evidence in general showed positive results, whereas the effectiveness was mixed for SAIs. No strong evidence indicates that any of the interventions pursued have been ineffective, but there is fair evidence that anti-corruption authorities, civil service reforms and the use of corruption conditionality in aid allocation decisions in general have not been effective.
 
The paper advocates more operationally-relevant research and rigorous evaluations to build up the missing evidence base, particularly in conflict-afflicted states, in regards to the private sector, and on the interactions and interdependencies between different anti-corruption interventions.

/pdf/mapping-evidence-gaps-in-anti-corruption-assessing-the-state-1av5tbc6ta.pdf

Mapping evidence gaps in anti-corruption: Assessing the state of the operationally relevant evidence on donors' actions and approaches to reducing corruption

This article attempts to evaluate the role the legislative budgetary oversight plays in enhancing budget transparency. This relationship has not been empirically tested so far. For a sample of 93 countries surveyed by International Budget Partnership in 2010, we show that, as expected, legislative budgetary oversight has a positive influence on budget transparency. Besides, the legal system, political competition, and economic level are also found to affect budget transparency. As an additional analysis, we investigate the determinants of legislative budgetary oversight along the budgetary process. In this vein, the type of legislature, legal system, Supreme Audit Institution’s budgetary oversight, economic level, and democratic level determine legislative budgetary oversight.

Budget Transparency and Legislative Budgetary Oversight An International Approach

This research underscores the limits of institutional design and constitutional engineering for improving the performance of government auditing. External factors, such as the functioning of the national system of fiscal control, the cycle of legislative accountability and the balance of political powers, matter greatly. A critical and often dysfunctional link is that between the AAA and their main principal, the legislature, as mediated by the legislature's public accounts committee. This functional relationship is particularly important in the monocratic and collegiate models of external auditing where the autonomous audit agency acts as an advisory body to the legislature, such as in Argentina. It is a crucial relationship to enforce ex post government accountability in financial matters through the annual certification of public accounts and the discharge of government.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID951844_code442922.pdf?abstractid=951844&mirid=1&type=2

Improving Fiscal Governance and Curbing Corruption: How Relevant are Autonomous Audit Agencies?

This research therefore underscores the limits of institutional design and constitutional engineering for improving the performance of government auditing. External factors, such as the functioning of the national system of fiscal control, the cycle of legislative accountability and the balance of political powers, matter greatly. A critical and often dysfunctional link is that between the AAA and their main principal, the legislature, as mediated by the legislature’s public accounts committee. This functional relationship is particularly important in the monocratic and collegiate models of external auditing where the autonomous audit agency acts as an advisory body to the legislature, such as in Argentina. It is a crucial relationship to enforce ex post government accountability in financial matters through the annual certification of public accounts and the discharge of government.

/pdf/improving-fiscal-governance-and-curbing-corruption-how-3exp99ydw3.pdf

Carlos Santiso

Papers

Improving Fiscal Governance and Curbing Corruption: How Relevant are Autonomous Audit Agencies?

Improving Fiscal Governance and Curbing Corruption: How Relevant are Autonomous Audit Agencies?