However, with major corruption cases emerging every now and then, we can say for sure that the struggle to establish a corruptionfree nation is far from over. Despite the Corruption Eradication Commission’s (KPK) hard work to bring corruptors to justice, the fact that investigation and prosecution do not seem to slow down corruption means it cannot be eradicated only by targeting the current offenders as future offenders will take their places. This is to say that when it comes to stopping future offenders, prevention is the only option.

As a fraud, corruption has its own fair share of unique characteristics. For example, many offenders did not start out to become corruptors but ended up becoming part of the country’s corruption problem. According to a global survey by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse (2016), over 80 percent of fraud offenders were once “good guys” who had never had criminal or bad employment records. This is no surprise as human behavior can change over time, for better or for worse.

Corruption skills are not something that people are born with, they must be obtained through a learning process, particularly within a group, an organization, or a society. Each culture has its own set of corruption-related problems.

In a highly collectivist society, for example, group corruption tends to occur more quickly than that in an individualist society. This, according to studies, is primarily caused by people’s desire to maintain their identities within their groups by doing everything other group members are doing, good or bad.

A survey on international business attitudes on corruption (2015) by the consulting firm Control Risks revealed that companies in non-Western countries faced a higher chance of losing deals to unethical competitors.

Furthermore, the survey also revealed that the companies surveyed in Indonesia were among those that suffered the most, losing 46 percent of such deals. Bribery paid by unethical companies was believed to be a major reason behind ethical companies’ failures to win business contracts.

According to the survey, the demand for bribes for all kinds of business purposes was high in many emerging markets.

These included the so-called “facilitation payments”, small bribes to speed up official and administrative matters. In Indonesia, according to the majority of the respondents, failure to comply with bribery demands could result in major delays, or even cause their businesses to grind to a halt.

This was supported by another global study on bribery, by Ernst & Young, the Global Fraud Survey (2012), which revealed that 60 percent of Indonesian respondents believed it was acceptable to pay cash to secure new business opportunities, whereas 44 percent believed providing entertainment to decision makers to win new business was also acceptable. All of this suggests that corruption in all of its forms may be so deeply ingrained into our minds that we do not even realize that it is there.

So far as behavioral sciences are concerned, one of the biggest mistakes in mitigating corruption is treating people as if they were machines that shared the same architecture. This can be seen, for example, by measures that overly emphasize changing existing systems and structures rather than people’s behavior (naively) hoping that everybody will consequently change their attitude toward corruption once the existing systems and structures have been changed.

Well, guess what? They don’t. There are numerous behavioral factors that constitute an individual’s decision as to whether or not he or she will engage in corruption. Such factors stem from the offender’s original environment.

Cultural factors are among the most overlooked and yet, as studies suggest, are among the most influential. It is noteworthy that such factors do not always result in negative behavior. When properly used, they can actually produce positive results, such as an increase in productivity.

However, evidence also suggests that they are often misinterpreted and misused to support unethical, or even unlawful, conduct. For example, kinship has often been used to justify the unlawful distribution of political power among family members, which eventually leads to the emergence of corrupt political dynasties. In 2016, there were around 69 heads of regions arrested by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) for corruption, which implies that corrupt political dynasties and their “little kings” may still be lurking in the country.

At least 15 successful sting operations were executed by the KPK throughout 2016 to uncover multiple corruption cases in the country, which sparks optimism that we will fare better against corruption in the near future.

However, learning from past experience, mere optimism will not get us far in our struggle against corruption. It takes much more than just punishing the offenders to put an end to our immortal enemy known as corruption. Indeed, there have been visible efforts, in particular by the KPK, to spread information on corruption prevention to society through various means, such as education and supervision in various institutions.

However, one must realize that unlike prosecution, which always runs on the same path in the existing legal framework, studies suggest that corruption prevention should be tailored to the characteristics of the targeted groups. In other words, different groups of people require different approaches to prevent corruption.

For example, in a highly religious society, clerics and religious leaders hold central roles in shaping people’s behavior in society and thus they must also be part of corruption prevention initiatives to create a corruption intolerant society. Overall, people need to be taught to let go of their knowledge of everything that leads to corrupt acts (e.g. blind obedience to leaders, harmony over integrity, image over capability).

In other words, systematic behavioral re-engineering is what Indonesia needs to prevent corruption from being passed down to the next generations. This can only be done with the full support of the government, as well as society.

***

The writer is Director of the Center for Forensic Accounting Studies at the Islamic University of Indonesia. He obtained his Masters and Doctorate in forensic accounting from the University of Wollongong Australia.

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