Almost 3,000 Malaysian government employees had been caught taking bribes over the last decade, lawmakers heard on Friday, topping the list of receivers of under the table payments over the past decade and nearly three times more than in the private sector.
Bribery remains entrenched in Malaysian society despite strong public sentiments for its eradication. High-profile corruption scandals, including those involving several former prime ministers, has done little to dampen the public appetite for an end to what many say is a pay-to-play system that covers everything from passing vehicle inspections to winning a government contract.
Malaysia ranks 57th out of 180 countries in the latest Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), second to neighbouring Singapore among Southeast Asian nations.
In a written reply to parliament on the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission data, Law Minister Azalina Othman Said noted that 6,585 cases of soliciting and giving bribes were recorded between 2015 and June 30 this year.
Of those caught accepting bribes, 2,965 were public servants, compared with 1,101 private sector employees.
The ethnic breakdown revealed Malays accounted for 75 per cent of bribe-soliciting cases – 3,690 out of the total – followed by Chinese and then Indians. Yet in contrast, those most likely to pay bribes were ethnically Chinese.
Many Malaysians said the figures only confirmed their experience, with some online users noting that little was done to deter offenders.
“Decades after decades when the audit report is tabled, has there ever been one without misappropriation, misuse of public funds?” one Facebook user wrote.
Others called for harsher laws, including the death penalty, to put fear into would-be offenders.
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim responded positively to a suggestion by Deputy House Speaker Ramli Mohd Nor to reward whistle-blowers with cash incentives for exposing abuses within government ranks, saying “nothing happens otherwise”.
“Maybe we can give a reward of some 1,000 or 2,000 ringgit (US$237 or US$474),” Anwar said on August 4. “I can consider it.”
Source : SCMP
Malaysia Civil Service Exorbitant Mismanagement Wastage Over RM122 Billion Annually
The Auditor-General’s Report usually highlights the wastage and leakage of allocated budget and taxpayers’ money
Don’t expect any civil servants to be charged and jailed for the mismanagement of funds.
The Auditor-General’s Report has no impact on any civil servant as the auditor-general has no authority to prosecute.
The enforcement agencies pretend not to know, not to see, and not to rock the boat.
The blame is always on the standard operating procedure (SOP) and not on anybody else.
When nobody goes to jail for the misappropriation of funds, most civil servants think it is SOP as no action is taken.
The most salient point raised by the recent Auditor-General’s Report 2022 was the exorbitant wastage running to over RM122 billion which was seen as recurring annually.
How then will Malaysia be poised to emerge as a dynamic and resilient player in the global economic arena if mismanagement and corruption work hand in hand? Are civil service officers being reprimanded or fired for losses and wastage in their organisations? NO! As a result, the losses keep repeating.
There was also an incident where those civil servants who caused the loss of funds did so due to stupid decisions and not due to corruption.
There is no law to charge for stupidity. When the head of the government can do what he likes with impunity, the civil servants just follow.
The rakyat won’t be able to see any changes now and forever as the ruling coalition depends on the civil servants to vote them in.
This corruption is so deeply entrenched within the civil service that it is nearly impossible to rectify.
Source : Malaysiakini
MACC: Five senior military officers accused of leaking intel to RM5m-a-month smuggling ring, among 10 remanded
The Magistrate’s Court today issued remand orders against 10 individuals, including five senior Malaysian Armed Forces (MAF) officers, to assist the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission’s (MACC) investigation into a smuggling syndicate operating in the country’s south.
The MACC said the others remanded comprise two journalists from an online media agency, a company manager, an administrative assistant at the Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) and a foreign woman.
“Four male suspects have been remanded for seven days until Aug 20, two men and one woman for two days until Aug 18, while two men and one Indonesian woman are remanded for three days until Aug 15,” it said in a statement today.
The remand orders were issued by Magistrate Irza Zulaikha Rohanuddin.
According to sources, the five senior military officers and five civilians, aged between 30 and 55, were arrested around the Klang Valley yesterday in ‘Op Sohor’, carried out by MACC’s Intelligence Division with the cooperation of the Royal Malaysia Police (PDRM).
The military intelligence officers are suspected of colluding with the syndicate by leaking operational information to help them evade enforcement.
The smuggled goods allegedly brought into the country include drugs, cigarettes and other items from neighbouring countries, with an estimated value of about RM5 million a month.
The raids followed about 12 months of intelligence gathering, and the suspects are believed to have received between RM30,000 and RM50,000 in bribes for each smuggling trip conducted.
The network involving the officers is believed to be large and complex.
In the Wednesday operation, MACC also seized over RM63,000 in cash, several packages suspected to contain drugs, weighing and measuring equipment, liquor and imitation firearms found at the raided premises.
Meanwhile, MACC Intelligence Division Senior Director Datuk Saiful Ezral Arifin said the suspects are being investigated for corruption and money laundering offences.
Reforming the Civil Service: As Critical as it is Challenging
Limiting the Bureaucracy
In the wake of President Trump’s inauguration in the US, voters wait with bated breath on his promise to “drain the swamp.” This, he had failed to do in his first term.
This time, Trump has appointed Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and affluent entrepreneur-politician Vivek Ramaswamy to lead an advisory Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Their main task is to trim the fiscal deficit by cutting the federal budget by US$2 trillion through measures such as reducing waste, abolishing redundant agencies, and downsizing the federal workforce.
In some ways, this can be described as a battle between oligarchs in the business world and the entrenched “Little Napoleons” in the civil service, whose effective power is far from little.
Here at home, even before US elections, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim (PMX), faced with mounting criticisms on slow reforms have also rightly turned his focus on the civil bureaucracy. Since the turn of the century, two administrations have tried to circumvent the lethargy and stonewalls of the civil service. During the administration of Abdullah Badawi, the so-called Fourth Floor was staffed with young Oxbridge and Ivy League graduates researching and giving policy advice to the government. This led to sniping attacks by Abdullah’s predecessor Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who considered Abdullah’s style of governance to be self-abdication in favour of a group of young brash inexperienced boys. Abdullah’s modus operandi amounted to an extent to a sidelining of the civil service. Although alienated and vulnerable, the political feud allowed the civil service to escape accountability. In the Najib Razak administration, learning from that episode, two units i.e. Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) and 1Malaysia Development Bhd. were established as agents of change to transform the fabric of the civil administration and the Malaysian economy. That story unfolded very unfortunately. Corruption at the top reached unthinkable levels, leaving the country saddled with a civil service that was not only bloated and inefficient but ever more corrupt, from the top to the root [1].
Is Big Good in Governance?
Malaysia’s bureaucracy is one of the biggest in the world, with 1.7 million civil servants to a population of 32 million, a ratio of 4.3%. In comparison, Singapore’s ratio is 1.5% civil servants to total population, Hong Kong’s is 2.3% and Taiwan’s is 2.3% [2]. Ministry of Finance records show that total public service employees increased from 877,100 in 1999 to 1.3 million in 2011 (3.3 per cent in annual rise)[3]. The number reached 1.39 million in 2023. This shows that the growth rate slowed between 2011 to 2023, to 0.6 per cent per year. The civil service costs RM41 billion a year to upkeep and RM23 billion in pensions in 2023. It is undoubtedly a bold and arduous move by PMX to tackle the civil service head-on on corruption. While what Malaysia now has as its civil service is to an extent an unelected middle-class workforce which has fallen into immorality and mediocrity, it is still a vote-bank that political leaders cannot ignore or can threaten only at their peril.
However, without reforming this foundational institution into being capable of contributing to sustainable good governance, the country cannot but lose competitiveness at a critical time, not to mention its burgeoning pension burden. The contradiction between a government mandated to carry out urgent reforms and the entrenched power of “little napoleons” in the civil service [4]is no longer possible to ignore. Parliament itself, along with the Executive branch of government, risk in effect to have their neutered position further manifested.
Why voter support for the Reformasi Movement had remained relatively strong throughout the two decades after 1998 is partly due to tolerance of high-handed and blatant exercise of power, inefficiency and incompetence becoming accepted and unchecked norms. As if it were idle hands seeking inappropriate work, there have been countless cases where the bureaucracy had gone beyond their scope as the country’s civil service to impose arbitrary rules such as dress-codes and blatant racial discrimination on
members of the public calling on them for various legitimate reasons. This is no longer loyalty to king and country or a neutral, impartial and objective service to the public.
As a result of the 1MDB saga and with a change of government in 2018, the civil service, in an attempt to escape culpability, rebranded their tagline from “saya yang menurut perintah” (I who obey orders”) to “saya yang menjalankan amanah” (I who carry out the trust).
The public were appalled by how a blatant 1MDB scandal of unimaginable magnitude could happen unnoticed right under the nose of paper shufflers and pencil pushers. A systemic failure had been allowed to fester for too long; failures in moral conscience or tacit collusion and turning a blind eye had become an unquestioned norm.
Lead from Within and Push for Digital
Political leaders are always under pressure to show results in the short tenure given but are often frustrated in their transformation efforts. Hence many have tried to skirt around and bypass the bureaucratic behemoth, either by setting up government-linked companies and agencies, or advisory units such as DOGE, PEMANDU etc. But these strategies may show some semblance of change in the short run, ultimately it is non-sticky in systemic effect, and tends to become ineffective or be sucked into the pervasive civil service culture.
On the battle against corruption, for change in culture to happen, the decay needs to be arrested from within and at the top; this can only be done by leaders who are committed to restoring professionalism and prestige within the service. An overhaul of leadership in the civil bureaucracy is required if these leaders are to hope for any chance of success. But this is a task as difficult as rooting out the Mafia.
To restore the pyramid of talent, Peter’s Principle of promoting people out of seniority to the level of incompetence must be curbed. Leaders of substance know that they are only as good as the team of talent they build around them. Integrity can only be restored by leaders that have it themselves, and who can demonstrate that fact by example.
One effective way to overhaul leadership may be to recruit and parachute talent in from outside to fill pensioned positions and to implement a more rigorous psychographic testing for promotions. Corruption is a never-ending malaise that must always be on the radar and its cancerous spread must be nipped early before it becomes embedded in the organization culture.
It starts with simple tolerance of behaviours that may be seemingly trivial such as taking a piece of stationary home, reporting for work late or missing deadlines (which is a theft of time), accepting small gifts, etc. The recent prosecution of a Minister in Singapore demonstrates the serious commitment of their government to zero tolerance of even the slightest impropriety. After all, if people cannot be trusted to do the little things right, how can they be trusted with the big things.
China has been battling corruption for decades. This seems an everlasting battle, and in a poignant warning, President Xi Jinping said If you want to be an official, don’t try to get rich. If you want to get rich, don’t try to be an official (当官就不要发财发财就不要当官). The paramount leader must show it means business in its war against corruption, and that rigid obedience of law must prevail over flexible practices of relationships. Both the taker of bribes and the giver of bribes must be held equally accountable. The strong push for digitalization in China is to raise the transparency and auditability of transactions. That seems a good path to take. However, digitalization alone is not sufficient. Systems have to be integrated across silos to ensure information flow and equal enforcement. This has to apply across Ministries and agencies, and across federal and state levels.
The competency to investigate by the Malaysia Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) and the competency to frame charges by the Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) has to happen in an atmosphere that is not affected by fear or favour, and that is free from political pressure. But at the same time, this power cannot be unbridled lest MACC becomes like the American FBI under Edgar Hoover who held a dossier on people of influence and was able to hold them at ransom. One way to avoid this, or at least limit that tendency, is for the Head of the Anti-corruption agency to be obliged to report to a Parliamentary Sub-committee. Within the agency, there is also a need for a function that investigates the investigators.
Transforming Malaysia Inc.
Where fighting inefficiency is concerned, there are many structural issues that need to be addressed. Firstly, the government needs to behave more like a multinational corporate (MNC) entity accountable to its shareholders, which in its case is the electorate. Increasing the salaries of the civil service is a good first step to enroll them on the change journey but it is vital that this be accompanied by a raising of the bar on recruitment and performance.
