Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 18th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview III. Working Group on Civil Service Author(s) Kaja Gadowska Jagiellonian University Krakow Poland Title The problem of corruption of civil servants in Poland: The reasons, the most common mechanisms, and the ways to curb the phenomenon File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Corruption of public officials is a serious problem in post-communist countries. Public opinion surveys show that over 90 percent of Poles think that nepotism and favoritism hold sway in public offices, 85 percent consider that issues of interest can be handled through the appreciation related to a bribe, over 70 percent believe that many high-level public officials take undue advantages from their public function, and almost 70 percent of all respondents are convinced that it is common for public officials and politicians to transfer funds to their own political parties. At the same time, over 50 percent of Poles express their belief that corruption takes place most frequently amongst politicians, party-activists, and members of the parliament, while almost 30 percent of respondents consider corruption to be most widely spread in central public offices, and regional government offices. These common social beliefs are reinforced by media reports on corruption scandals, in which public officials are involved. The paper, based on empirical research carried out during 2009, is an attempt to verify public conviction about corruption in public administration, especially corruption of civil servants. The aim of the paper is to indicate the areas most prone to this phenomenon, and to identify the most common patterns of corruptive practices in public offices. The article will concentrate on corruption in the law making process (executive law making at the level of the ministries, informal lobbing), irregularities in decision making by tax administration (especially issuing fiscal decisions concerning private firms by the Tax Offices, the Tax Chambers and the Ministry of Finance), and irregularities in public procurement (public tenders procedures). The paper will examine the hypothesis on the impact of personnel management on decision making by civil servants: the greater is the impact of political factors instead of meritocratic criteria in the process of staffing the posts in civil service and the weaker are the guarantees of stable employment, the more prone are the servants to yield to the suggestions of their political patrons (and to realize their particular interests even at the expense of the interest of the state) and the more likely are they to fail to resist corruption. The article will also discuss the most often formulated propositions of measures to be taken to curb corruption among civil servants.
