‘Red Flags of Corruption’ in World Bank Projects : An Analysis of Infrastructure Contracts

Kenny, Charles ; Musatova, Maria

关键词: ACCOUNTING;    AFFILIATED ORGANIZATIONS;    ALLEGATIONS OF CORRUPTION;    AUCTION;    AUCTIONS;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-5243
RP-ID  :  WPS5243

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

"Red flags" are indicators ofpotential issues regarding governance failure, collusion orcorruption in projects. While some specific red flags can bepowerful indicators of issues to be addressed, thehypothesis of this paper is that many proposed red flags arepotentially too ubiquitous and randomly distributed to beuseful as indicators of significant governance failure. Thepaper examines project documentation from a small sample ofWorld Bank water and sanitation projects in an attempt tocollect data on the presence or absence of 13 commonlyaccepted red flags. This paper finds that: (i) almost everycontract reviewed raised at least one of 13 red flagsanalyzed; (ii) potentially tainted contracts did not exhibitnotably more red flags than control contracts; and (iii) theoccurrence of multiple red flags in the same contract wasrare enough to suggest that joint occurrence was largely bychance, not as a result of a strongly causalinter-relationship between flags. The ubiquity and apparentrandomness of these red flags suggests that their roll-outas a monitoring tool requires additional thought as tointerpretation, context and use. The paper examines analternate tool for uncovering potential problem projects --supplier concentration. Across a very small sample, theredoes appear to be a relationship between such concentrationand potential problem projects.