The report urged that the names of officials convicted of corruption be made public, and that figures showing the total number of officials dismissed be published at certain intervals. At present, there are numerous angry cries that when a crooked British official is caught and sacked, he is spirited out of the colony without a word about it; whereas a Chinese official fired for a similar offense receives unrelenting publicity and back-handed treatment that implies, “Well, what else can you expect from these Orientals?”
The Anti-Corruption Branch of the police department is now the chief agency responsible for detecting corruption in all departments of government. The Committee has invited direct reports of corruption from the public, some of which have led to the prosecution and firing of several officials. During the first eleven months of 1961, the police department received an additional 422 complaints charging corruption. Americans are usually surprised to find that the colony’s police department is charged with detecting corruption in other government departments. In America it is done the other way around; other government departments seem to be investigating the police force for signs of corruption.
Generally unsubstantiated but endlessly repeated to visitors, are the popular charges that the police are shaking down shopkeepers and peddlers, or that building inspectors are blinded by gold when a builder is detected extending a structure over a sidewalk in violation of local codes and ordinances.
The report, last of the series issued by the Committee, suggested that it would be desirable to hold the givers of bribes equally guilty with the civil servants who accepted them. This is a sticky issue in any community, despite the unassailability of its ethical position. If it were rigidly enforced, it would infringe the freedom of speech of many prominent persons who deplore dishonesty in government, because it would put them in jail.
The Advisory Committee has also warned civil servants to deal only with the applicants in person, or with professional representatives in order to exclude corrupt middlemen from all transactions. This warning is especially appropriate in Hong Kong, where a middleman with no discernible function except his ability to collect a fee will attempt to worm himself into every business deal.