Colombia
years earlier, when citizens may not have known the destination of royalties, or even realised their municipality received them.26 As citizens begin to demand government accountability, less pressure may be placed on companies to foot the bill for infrastructure such as schools or health care centres. Despite their benefits, CSIRs have limitations. While CSIRs can monitor government decisions, they have no mechanisms to examine industry behaviour. Nor have they methods to confront conflicts of interests experienced by industry members. For example, a participating company’s desire to maintain good relationships with local authorities may undermine its capacity to monitor that same government objectively. Committees also risk being dominated by industry leadership. In many cases, industry officials have single-handedly selected a CSIR technical secretary and decided how resources were to be administered and allocated. These problems, paired with entrenched public mismanagement and uncertainties over the committees’ long-term financial sustainability, threaten the success of CSIRs. Even facing these challenges, CSIRs can assist in combating the misuse of royalties. Such help is overdue. In the first months of 2008 the national planning department received 5,800 files suggesting that royalties had been wasted on risky purchases, prohibited investments and flawed contracts.27 While CSIRs have neither the legislative nor enforcement capacity to quash royalty misuse by themselves, they nevertheless have an important role to play. By promoting local democracy, bolstering citizen participation and furthering public access to information, over time CSIRs may help drive these numbers down.
Recent surveys According to a recent survey on the implementation of bribery-prevention practices in Colombian businesses, 91 per cent of company managers or legal representatives said they believe that there are Colombian entrepreneurs who offer bribes in the course of their business.28 The study, undertaken by TI Colombia and the Universidad Externado of Colombia, examined 537 companies representing the geographic spread of business in Colombia and covering enterprises of all sizes and sectors, including industry, trade, services and agriculture/mining. The findings suggest that entrenched perceptions of public and private corruption in Colombia discourage companies from establishing measures to prevent bribery. Seventy-two per cent of those polled agreed that anti-bribery principles would be useful, yet most do not implement them because they are put off by suspicions of corruption in the public sector (47 per cent) or perceived corruption on the part of competitors (42 per cent). For some, it seems as though bribes make good business sense, with 54 per cent viewing bribery as a strategy to trump the competition. Such attitudes offer little incentive for companies to implement anti-bribery measures. Indeed, only 11 per cent of responding enterprises said they have comprehensive programmes against bribery. Because it is large businesses that display the greatest progress in establishing measures to counter bribery, however, the researchers suggest that Colombia’s biggest enterprises have a central role to play in making their anti-bribery expectations known to smaller suppliers. The researchers further conclude that
26 Ibid. 27 El Tiempo (Colombia), 28 February 2008. 28 TI Colombia and the Universidad Externado de Colombia, ‘Primera Encuesta Nacional sobre Prácticas contra el Soborno en Empresas Colombianas’ no. 15, Cuadernos de Transparencia (Bogotá: TI Colombia, Universidad Externado, 2008).
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