False Claims, Bribery and Corruption in the Public Service

By LUCAS KIAP

In a nutshell, the State has over the years ended up paying millions if not billions of Kina of public funds for false claims.

The culture of false claims against the State is now seen by many as acceptable whether it has merit or not. When one makes such claims, they know exactly what the requirements are and the process to be followed to make a false and illegal claim appears genuine and legal. As a result the Vulupindi House has been turned into a false claim entity, where one can freely trade yellow envelopes containing false claims with bribery and promises of getting a cut out of the claim if approved and paid.

This culture of false claims is not only happening at the Treasury, Finance, and National Planning or Lands departments. It is widespread across all government departments and institutions.

This is not a secret anymore. You will see a lot of yellow envelopes floating around at the Vulupindi house. How such claims are entertained is anyone’s guess but the very obvious is a network of people from persons making the claims to those in key positions who get bribery, arrange and facilitate the payment. They all profit from the scheme. Politicians also entertain and promote this culture.

If the money allocated to provide goods and services in the country have been misused, abused or stolen in such demeaning ways as false claims, then one would wonder why every government departments complain about inadequate or shortfalls in budget allocations every year to properly carry out their duties.

Lucky for the public service, lack of funding has been successfully used over the years as an excuse for the non-performance of the public sector in the delivery of goods and services across the country. People have been misled to believe that the government’s budget allocations are insufficient or inadequate to provide the basic goods and services which the people badly need and perhaps explain the lack of it too.

However, the government’s inability to take appropriate measures through policy, legislations, laws or whatever means necessary to curtail the false claims culture is deplorable. What even more worrying is that when the government finally realizes it, to take control of the situation will be much more difficult as the public service mechanism is weak, capacity constraint, corrupted, lack of drive and motivation, and lack of control and discipline. Thus the implementation and policing aspects of such measures if taken will still remain in the balance.

The false claims, bribery and corruption culture in the public service is due to failures of every government over the years to instil a culture of discipline among the employees has seen the public service evolved into a large monster consuming a larger portion of the budget every year with little or minimum output.

If the public service responsible for implementing and policing government’s development plans is seen to be like that, this raises a lot of questions about the government’s ability and big budget plans to achieve PNG’s Vision 2050 to make PNG a better, healthy and a smarter nation in 2050. Then one wonders where all the billions of kina budgeted every year will eventually end up. This is a sad scenario of PNG’s future.

Despite the grim future, will the government continue to deceive and mislead the people with its big budget plans, visions and development plans without consequences? The government’s ability to manipulate and confuse the people into thinking that lack of basic goods and services in the country is due to budget constraints and lack of funding has slowly been exposed. It is becoming very obvious that white collar criminals have been stealing directly and indirectly millions and billions of kina every year, through false claims, bribery and corruption. It is also known that PNG is rich in natural resources yet it remains poor despite billions in revenues from those natural resources.

To conclude, I am warning the government that if the practice of false claims, bribery and corruption in the public sector continues unabated, everyone will end up destroying this beautiful country. We may as well terminate the future because the future generations should not be made responsible to shoulder the burden of our failures to shape a better future.