In Australia, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (‘the ICAC’ or ‘the Commission’) is an anti-corruption agency in the State of New South Wales (NSW) that has a dual mandate to investigate and to prevent public sector corruption. These roles are pursued by the Commission both separately and in combination. The investigative function employs standard law enforcement investigation techniques and the ICAC’s prevention activities include training, policy and analysis and advice for the public sector as well as public education. The two functions merge in a cooperative way in particular operational activities and projects. They also have a conceptual symbiosis in the sense that public inquiries can be a method of deterring corruption as well as detecting it. The Commission’s investigations are required to be conducted with a view to “determining the factors that may allow, encourage or cause corruption to occur” (s13(2) ICAC Act 1988). After 16 years of conducting investigations the Commission now has a sufficiently large body of investigation reports to analyse for information they may contain about factors that might “cause, encourage or allow corruption to occur”. This paper reports on the project, which is ongoing, and presents its findings to date. The paper describes the context of the project, including the role and work of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, and the methodology chosen. It relates findings from the study and indicates some of the ways that the information obtained might be incorporated into routine improvements to the ICAC’s prevention work. Key words: public administration, governance, corruption, corruption control, fraud prevention, internal control, organisational culture, leadership.

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In February 1992, what had begun as a simple case of extortion ended up by revealing that corruption in Italy had been widespread and systematic. More than five thousand people were investigated in the course of the enquiries, including Premiers, Members of Parliament, Ministers, and public and private entrepreneurs among others. The successful outcome of these investigations was achievable due to the conjugation of a series of elements: strong public opinion and media support, the independency of the Magistrates, Public Prosecutors and Judicial Police vis-à-vis the political sphere, and the efficiency of the strategy followed by the judiciary. Hampering even better results was the ineffectiveness of international judicial assistance, given that corrupt exchanges do often involve transnational cleaning operations.

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There has been an explosion of interest in anti corruption since the 1990s,particularly by global institutions and NGOs such as the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and Transparency International. Anti Corruption strategies are promoted to Less Developed Countries as both a means of improving the delivery of services to citizens and as a pre requisite for the receipt of aid. A massive anti corruption aid industry has grown on the body of the global polity where none had existed before. The global institutions appear to be promoting these programs based on little actual research and without a genuine theoretical basis. The only viable coherent body of theory available is the Political Economy approach which relies on the underlying tools and assumptions of neoclassical economics and public choice theory. It is apparent that this is inadequate as the basis for practical anti corruption measures, and most global institutions and NGO’s promote a variant of the improve governance, institutions strengthening strategy. This paper suggests that it is important to have a theoretical understanding of how corruption functions, and that some fruitful areas of research have been overlooked. Corruption should be understood as a social process and therefore interdisciplinary research using the tools of criminology, Social Network Analysis, Power Dependence Theory and other areas of social research will yield insights that assist in providing answers to some of the basic research questions yet to be answered. Research in these areas may improve the effectiveness of the global anti corruption industry whose success to date has not been encouraging. Key words: Corruption; anti-corruption; governance; organizational theory; social network analysis; criminology

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Corruption is a very old problem in government, and concern about corruption has shaped the development of public services. For example, in many countries a Public Service Commission conducts exams or sets for the selection of suitable candidates to be appointed to the Civil Service posts. In this way it prevents political patronage, as well as promoting expertise. Many countries have established specialist anti corruption agencies relatively independent of the police or of the government. Since the mid 1990s, there has been new international attention to corruption. Transparency International (TI), an NGO founded in 1993, publishes an influential Corruption Perceptions Index , and has a number of national groups that lobby governments. The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank now promote anti-corruption in their lending. Economists have become influential in international thinking about corruption. Comparing many countries, Daniel Kaufmann’s statistical work for the World Bank finds correlations between corruption and low growth rates (Kaufmann, Kraay and Zoido 1999). The UN has a Convention against corruption. It sets out a comprehensive agenda for combating corruption in the public and private sectors. Keywords: Corruption; Corruption Control; Governance; Anti Corruption Agencies.

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