Today: Bribery & Secret Accounts
When I was still generating application software, I always had to do requirement engineering. Well, the term had at least the advantage that the word “management” was not part of it. Today, one would probably call it “requirement management”. Now, however, I prefer the more agile approach of a system outline with “user stories” and “use cases”.
Regardless of how you name it, you will always find something like Entity-Relationship-Models (ERM). Objects, or rather classes of objects, are described along with the qualitative relationship between said objects or classes of objects.
For me, the best example of an ER model is love. You have the lover (entity E1), love (relationship L->) and the beloved (entity E2), also E1 L-> E2. Of course, it is true for both sexes.
And as soon as the relationship is symmetrical (<-L->), you get a “Happy End“.
Even the doubtless very clever Jesuits as the best thinkers of the Catholic Church used exactly this same metaphor in order to make the incomprehensible and often doubted Trinity Dogma look humane. They simply made God the Father the lover, the Holy Spirit love and Jesus the beloved one.
Bribery can also be defined as an entity relationship model. There is a briber, the bribery and the bribed person. As early as a few decades ago, we had a controversial discussion and debate during a Rupert Lay – at the time he was considered the doyen in business and society – seminar.
All managers present agreed that bribery, at least if a German civil servant is concerned, is an absolute “no-go”, because it is definitely forbidden by law. However, bribing a buyer in a society that is definitely corrupt – for example in order to preserve jobs – might well be ethically acceptable. After all, someone else might otherwise do the bribing. And besides, our tax offices accept a declaration where “special expenses” are permissible up to a certain amount of money without giving the name of the recipient.
So much on the management concept of the 1980ies. Personally, I saw – and still see – matters a little differently. One reason is that such reasoning would make any behaviour acceptable, even using other unethical means – for instance violence. Another reason is that this kind of bribery would just make the wheels of corruption turn even faster.
How does bribery look in (real) life?
As a general rule, corruption consists of a system of illegal accounts. After all, it can only work if the briber (E1) and the bribed person (E2) remain unknown. Consequently, you have to take the money out of the enterprise circle as early as possible and transfer it into the shadow realm of illegal money.
In this realm, there are no rules – or rather, individual persons make the rules. As we all know, individual persons are weak and can easily be tempted. Especially if their social background is a corrupt system like the illegal account system showing them how to do it.
Humans love themselves most. And their sense of justice will protest if a corrupt person from an alien world is to get such a huge amount of money on top of everything. Consequently, they take a considerable sum out of the bribery money for themselves – which, in my opinion, is easy to understand. Any other behaviour would be more than stupid.
I assume that (more than) half of the bribery moneys paid never reach the bribed persons. Instead, it remains with the bribers. That is what makes bribery so problematic. Because all of a sudden, the ERM becomes symmetrical. The briber wants the bribery as much as the bribed person, because they have become accomplices. The lie “you have to bribe because it is the general rule” becomes even weaker than it already was.
It goes without saying that the money that has been paid to both parties must end up somewhere – and, again, it gets clear why so many fake companies exist. This is how we get back to my first article of this small series. In my next two articles, I will describe in detail how I was to be bribed.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
I took the picture of the 1,000 – Euro bill fromWikipedia.
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