Public Sector & Civil Service Corruption
Probably the most obvious example of corruption within the civil service that is operating at an institutional level is in the implementation of IT projects. Other countries’ civil services seem able to utilise IT successfully at a tenth of the cost and in so doing reduce staff levels. Tony Blair called this public sector rationalisation “modernisation”; he lost his job to the Luddite Gordon Brown because of it.
Why do the UK civil service seem unable to utilise IT?
There are several possibilities:
1. Incompetence. This is a possibility but whatever the real reason incompetence is always going to be present, however it is not the only reason.
2. Sabotage. Given that the UK has the most expensive home civil service in the developed world this is likely. Overmanning is probably running at a minimum of fifty per cent and that is without IT. With IT there are probably 75% of the staff that could be made redundant without any impact on service provision. For example the MOD has more civil servants than members of the armed forces. Effectively each soldier has his or her own civil servant, yet they still failed to provide the correct equipment to them in Iraq and none of them ever, ever, ever get fired. So we know they are overstaffed, we know they never get fired and we know they get away with incompetence. All of this is a recipe for corruption on a massive scale. Why sabotage IT? To protect jobs, and more importantly to prevent the greater transparency and the ease of auditing that accompanies it of course.
3. Bribery. Bent civil servants use junior ministers with no powers as dupes to carry the can for their own corrupt practices in accepting kick backs from the IT companies involved.
4. A combination of 3. and 4. This is the most likely explanation, the institutional incompetence is a convenient mask and the sheer numbers of bureaucrats involved allows a kind of mass evasion of blame.
But why do politicians let them get away with it? Well given that the House of Lords is as bent as a nine bob note, and MPs can have dozens of directorships and “advisers” and “sponsors” (Labour MPs are sponsored by the same unions that protect the jobs of millions of unnecessary public servants) it is no surprise really. They all piss in the same cracked and bent pot. Politicians are pretty corrupt at all levels, taking money and favours, garnering “party donations” and the like. How do we know it’s only £18,000,000,000 that these crooks have pocketed? We don’t. This is the figure they are admitting to. So double it or even treble it. Let’s face it, if you or I wanted to have a look at the paperwork that backs these figures up and follow that paper trail to verify it we’d be given the runaround for a hundred years and still be no further forward.
So the Public Sector give themselves massive pension perks, make sure that there are millions of them by sabotaging IT with the connivance of bent contractors and politicians, make sure that the figures are never verifiable and make sure no one is ever to blame.
No wonder UK Plc is bust and sterling is a busted flush.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article5636437.ece
Tags: Public Sector Corruption
Posted by admin - 02/02/09 - 0 comments