Closely monitor 'public servants' who 'love bribe givers and hate those who don't pay envelopes'

The bad habit of harassment and petty corruption is not easy to give up and requires a strict and mandatory monitoring mechanism. People and businesses do not randomly bring envelopes to corrupt officials.

This is the opinion of Associate Professor Dr. Hoang Van Cuong - Member of the 14th National Assembly, Vice Principal of the National Economics University regarding the Prime Minister's direction requesting ministries and branches to soon issue directives to end the situation of "hot above, frozen below".

Associate Professor, Dr. Hoang Van Cuong: A civilized behavioral relationship must simultaneously be based on three pillars: a complete and strict legal system, strict sanctions, and the voluntary and active participation of the people in compliance and supervision of the implementation process.

Petty corruption in the performance of official duties

Associate Professor Dr. Hoang Van Cuong said that the current situation is quite common when businesses want to have their legitimate requests resolved quickly and have to "grease the wheels", showing that "petty corruption" has become a habit of many civil servants when performing their duties.

Therefore, the Prime Minister's determination to build a creative government must be in the consciousness of every civil servant and turned into actions to serve businesses.

“An honest and constructive government is not only about policies and guidelines but also about listening, discovering the needs of businesses and finding ways to respond to them as quickly as possible. The Prime Minister’s directive shows that the Government is determined to break the habit of stagnation and harassment of those who directly perform public duties in the public apparatus,” said Associate Professor Hoang Van Cuong.

From the perspective of an economic expert, Associate Professor Cuong further analyzed that the "harassment" of civil servants directly performing public duties has caused huge losses to businesses, not only in terms of bribery and kickback costs, but also in terms of lost business opportunities because the legitimate requests of businesses are not resolved or met in a timely manner.

"That discourages investors, hinders the birth and development of businesses, and in many cases is the cause of businesses going bankrupt" - Associate Professor Cuong emphasized.

In addition, from a social perspective, Associate Professor Cuong emphasized that the situation of "petty corruption" distorts the image of public agencies, public servants become abusive, taking advantage of and depriving the people.

That is gradually losing the trust of the people and businesses in the government, gradually creating a bad habit among the people and businesses of accepting bribes to get things done for themselves instead of speaking up to fight for integrity, openness and transparency. That is the fundamental cause of the "envelope mechanism" that is prevalent and permeates all social relations today.

Need for strict monitoring mechanism

Associate Professor Cuong affirmed that the bad habit of harassment and petty corruption cannot be easily abandoned by directives and orders, but it requires a strict and mandatory monitoring mechanism. People and businesses do not randomly bring envelopes to corrupt officials, but the underlying cause is that corrupt officials only love and treat well the businesses that... corrupt them.

“Therefore, there needs to be sanctions to monitor the transparency of public service processes and procedures so that corrupt officials do not arbitrarily “love” bribe-givers and “hate” those who refuse to bribe, but are forced to treat them equally according to publicly announced procedures.

At the same time, there should be a mechanism to encourage people and businesses to participate in monitoring the performance of public duties by officials and civil servants by providing evidence of "harassment" and handling it very seriously when evidence is provided" - Associate Professor Cuong said.

Agreeing with this view, a lawyer who is a National Assembly member said that to combat the situation of "hot above, frozen below", the authorities must find out where the bottleneck is.

“One of the things we have talked about a lot up to now is the story of the low effectiveness of handling violations. The reason stems from the fact that our law enforcement is not strict in some places. There are still many violators while the handling of violations is not thorough and effective. If we can thoroughly resolve this issue, I believe that the situation of harassment and abuse of power will no longer exist,” he said.

According to Infonet