Haslam, Nick

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Policy Documentation Center

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Policy 
Documentation 
Center Feature Article
Information Technology to Combat Czech Corruption  
by Nick Haslam   
Entrenched corruption within the Czech Republic is proving difﬁcult to eradicate and is now perceived as one
of the most pressing problems facing the country. A recent study published by Transparency International sug-
gests that the abuse of public power for private beneﬁt within the republic has increased by 25 percent since
1998. The international survey, which measures trends in levels of corruption shows that the Czech state has 
slipped 15 places in 4 years to rank 52nd with Morocco and Sri Lanka out of a total of 102 countries surveyed. 
To stem this widespread and often ﬂagrant ﬂouting of the law, the Czech government created the Ministry of
Informatics in 2002 to co-ordinate the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into 
the complex bureaucratic world of the public administration.  By publishing on the internet information which 
until now has been hidden from public scrutiny and by establishing a new principle of openness with improved 
accessibility to all kinds of data, it was that hoped corrupt practices could be curbed. In other countries, ICTs 
and ‘e-government’ have proved highly successful in lowering levels of corruption. The Chilean state, for ex-
ample, made savings of up to twenty percent when the usually obscure process of tendering and awarding 
state contracts was made open on a government website. In Seoul, South Korea, every application for public 
housing can be tracked in real time thanks to the OPEN system – a complex anticorruption package relying on 
ICTs which has with met with success and public approval.
A major offender in the Czech Republic is the public sector where opaque, complicated and arcane systems 
make it easy for dishonest state ofﬁcials and politicians to line their own pockets at the expense of the public
purse. Surveys show that a high percentage of Czech citizens expect to have to pay bribes almost as a mat-
ter of course in their dealings with the state administration. From corrupt judges working hand in glove with 
property speculators to minor ofﬁcials demanding bribes for the allocation of state housing or hospital beds, it
seems that fraud is the rule rather than the exception. Some blame can be placed on the legacy of the Soviet 
era where state corruption and cronyism were an inherent part of government. But the stampede to privatisa-
tion in the immediate post-communist era created many more opportunities for graft. Valuable state assets 
were offered up at ill-supervised auctions and sold off at knock-down prices.  High ranking ofﬁcials and even
organised criminal elements became involved in the scramble for easy and lucrative pickings. The numbers of 
ﬁnancial scandals though ﬁnally reached such a high level that the coalition government ﬁnally collapsed in 
1997 bemired in accusations of sleaze. But with many of the newly privatised companies proving unviable, the 
state again had to step in to bail out the casualties. This has led to an unhealthy amount of debt accumulating 
in government hands – the Czech Consolidation agency holding by the end of 2002 more than 11 billion USD 
of such unpaid bills.  A common solution has been to write off the debt and sell the companies back to their 
former managers at fractions of their real worth creating yet more opportunities for illegal proﬁt.  
The Ministry of Informatics begun tackling engrained corruption by publishing basic government policy docu-
ments on the web, and by setting up an email address for victims of corruption to conﬁdentially report to the
relevant authorities. However, initial response has been poor, with surveys showing that only 17 percent of 
Czechs use the internet to contact public ofﬁcials.  Civil servants too have proved resistant to the introduction
of ICTs and the principle of openness which they perceive as a threat to their position within the bureaucratic 
establishment.
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But now, academics and NGOs working in the Czech Republic have called for the Ministry of Informatics to 
be given more teeth and political clout. A report produced by Czech specialist Ondrej Cisar1 highlights several 
areas where ‘e-government’ could immediately have a powerful impact and suggests the Ministry of Informat-
ics work more closely with the Ministry of the Interior in a multi-pronged co-ordinated approach to accelerate 
the introduction of ICTs. 
Political lobbying and fund raising to ﬁnance party campaigns in national elections are very poorly regulated
currently in the Czech Republic with allegations that large corporations have set up foreign slush funds to buy 
support and inﬂuence political decisions. If the Ministry of Informatics could ensure that each political party
was now obliged to publish its annual accounts on the internet in order to qualify for statutory government 
funding, such illegal injections of cash would be far more difﬁcult to conceal. E-procurement, where details of
all government tendering are published on the web would ensure more openness in an area currently rife with 
abuse. A closely connected and relatively new ﬁeld is the legal registration of new companies. Currently the
regulatory framework is not clearly deﬁned and dishonest attorneys and judges are bribed to speed or hinder
the progress of applications through the courts. If all registration criteria were to be published on a govern-
ment website where each new application could be monitored in real time such opportunities would no longer 
exist.  
To implement this new rigorous approach Cisar suggests that special anticorruption units trained in ICTs should 
be set up by the Ministries of Informatics and the Interior with powers to enforce and penalise miscreants. 
Higher salaries coupled with clearer career structures would help overcome entrenched resistance amongst 
civil servants to ICTs and the general principle of more open government. NGOs and other agencies monitoring 
state activities should also be encouraged to coordinate their efforts by setting up a server dedicated speciﬁ-
cally to anticorruption matters. 
The Ministry of Informatics alone cannot provide a miracle cure yet with the Czech Republic at last making its 
ﬁrst steps along the information highway, a much clearer and more direct communication between citizen and
state is forecast. The correct implementation of ICTs will help facilitate this dialogue and begin the slow proc-
ess of undermining corrupt systems at all levels of the state.
 1  See Cisar, Ondrej, ‘Strategies for using information technologies for curbing public-sector corruption: the case of the Czech Republic’, a paper produced while the author was a fellow of the International Policy Fellowship programme.  


Information technology to combat Czech corruption

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