About 60% of businesses in Malaysia thought the police was corrupt. Only a shade less of the public at large thought so. This was Transparency International’s findings from a survey last month. Personally, I’m surprised the figures aren’t higher. Perhaps the police force formed a large proportion of the survey respondents without TI knowing. Talk to anyone on the streets (especially one who is a motorist) and he or she would invariably tell you the police in Malaysia are absolutely corrupt. In fact, I’d say almost all government and quasi government agencies are corrupt. These include majority government owned businesses. In my time in Malaysia, I have had, like most Malaysians, the misfortune to deal with all these agencies and l know from being a direct victim, that they are all corrupt. Let me tell you some of my experiences:
$ I had totally unreasonable delay in my application for approval for extension of our house.
$ Every time we get a new car, we’re told in no uncertain terms, that unless we pay up, we’ll have the worst possible number plate assigned to us.
$ Every time we want to renew our vehicle registration or driver’s license we either pay someone to have it done quickly or spend a whole day waiting in line.
$ Lose your wallet and you either pay the police or wait half a day to lodge a police report.
$ Don’t lodge the police report because you either can’t wait or wont pay, and you cant renew your national registration ID card, without which you’d be committing an offence.
$ When you do go on to apply for a replacement card, the same story goes. You either pay or spend half a day waiting in line.
$ In other words, losing a wallet in Malaysia is a nightmare because you then spend at least one whole day, if not two, to have your ID card and your driver’s license renewed.
$ If you’re involved in a road accident, you either pay the police handling your report or you wait the whole day to lodge the report and get a copy of that report, without which you can’t lodge your insurance claims.
$ TNB – the national power company, can appear out of nowhere and claim you’ve tampered with the meter and they will now assess you for usage not billed. You either pay the assessed bill, which you cant refute because there is no basis for their allegation and you cant refuse to pay because they would actually cut off supply, or you pay some officer in the company to have the account appropriately reversed.
$ Ditto the water company and the telephone company.
$ Ditto the inland revenue board, if you own a business. This happened to friends and relatives of mine who own their businesses. No there’s no meter to tamper with here but they would just say you have under-declared your revenue and they would now assess you for back taxes. So if you’re a typical small business, you’d find it more expedient to pay off some junior officer in the tax office instead of engaging a tax accountant (or worse, a tax lawyer) to fix things up. Not that it’s the right thing to do (that’s another theme for another day) but faced with a system which is corrupt to the core, the alternatives are only for the super altruists who are also super rich. Okay, so business is a different ball game – you’d find loads more situations for corrupt practices. Personal income tax can be an area for the tax office bloke to dip into your pocket for his personal gains, as well. Your boss pays bonus not during year end but at some weird time like April, for his tax cashflow benefits? Your tax would be out of whack and there’s a good chance you’d end up paying more tax than you had to. Want a quick refund? Pay some one in the tax office. Otherwise, wait in line and get your refund years later like everyone else.
$ Stay home one afternoon and have someone from the health department or local council call on you to do a spot check for larvae of aedes mosquitoes. Pay him and he’d mosey away.
$ Have to renew your passport? Either be prepared to take at least the morning off to get in line at the immigration office before dawn, or pay someone in the department.
$ Want your child to get into a particular school for whatever reason? That’s right – pay someone. Sometimes you even need to have the right referrals, to know who you’ve got to take care of. To do that, you’d have a preliminary payment before the actual one. Malaysia boleh.
One can go on but one gets the picture.
Ante 