Bribery

Bribery is a universal problem; it occurs in one form or the other in every society, in response to the primal desire by most humans to improve their standard of living. It is considered a less taxing way to get access to business or personal advantage. Bribery has gained an unofficial acceptance in some societies as the normal way of transacting business. But the practice is considered wrong—very wrong—by the large majority of ordinary people, most of whom cannot afford to give bribes (or are not in a position to receive them) and suffer grave social injustices as a result.

A bribe is generally defined as a valuable consideration in cash or kind given to a person occupying a position of trust with the intention of influencing him or her to act in a way favorable to the interest of the giver. A person occupying a position of trust (for example, the president of a country, prime minister, minister, secretary of state, chief executive officer, or police officer) has certain powers and privileges to exercise according to a set of rules, either explicitly stated or understood. Such people are in charge of running bureaucracies or formal organizations (public or private) according to these rules. If a person approaches these officials in the course of exercising their powers and attempts to influence their conduct with any gifts or cash, such a person is indulging in bribery with the intent to corrupt the official. The set of rules being violated governs not only the rights and duties of employees in a formal organization but also those of the public seeking the services that the organization provides.

People in positions of trust wield enormous power not only over the fortunes of those seeking to come into or already employed by their organizations, but also [Page 125]over those seeking the benefit of their services. They have the power to recruit or fire employees, to discipline or promote, to approve or disapprove, to issue or revoke permits or licenses. Indeed, people in positions of trust have the power to provide most of the range of services required by the public.

Bribery is aimed at achieving two main goals: (a) to influence the trustee to bend the rules (for example, jumping the queue) in favor of the giver, or to break them outright in favor of the giver (for example, issuing permits or licenses in excess of the limit or to unqualified clients); and (b) to hasten the pace at which a legitimate official duty is performed in the interest of the giver.

In the examples under (a) above, rules are bent or broken, and this mounts to a misperformance of duties by the trustee, that is, corruption; and in the example in (b), no rules are broken, but the trustee ignores the established convention to act expeditiously, which is unusual but legal. Both of these objectives have a negative impact, namely, social injustice. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with officials acting unusually quickly to provide clients with services, but such unusual actions are unfair to citizens who do not have resources to bribe trustees to similarly expedite action on their requests. In this so-called catalyst type of bribery, the trustee breaks no rules, yet the outcome of his action creates social injustice. A bribe is “the use of a reward to pervert the judgment of a person in a position of trust” (Nye 1967: 412). Bribery that becomes synonymous with corruption is of the most serious concern.

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