T

he ability of the Democratic Party to deliver on its campaign promise to be a clean party is now being put to the ultimate test as a number of its politicians are either prosecuted or are under criminal investigation for serious misconduct such as bribery and corruption.

The latest addition to the party’s “Hall of Shame” is Angelina Sondakh, who in 2001 was crowned Miss Indonesia and soon after that began her career in politics.

Early this month, the Australian-born Angelina was named a suspect by the Indonesian Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) for alleged bribery in the SEA Games athletes’ village scandal.

The once promising young politician is now facing a jail sentence along with fellow young Democratic Party politician, Muhammad Nazaruddin. Angelina is alleged to have been involved in the scheme to unlawfully award the athletes’ village project to PT Duta Graha Indah.

A thing worthy of note about Angelina’s case is that she was one of the models for the Democratic Party’s anti-corruption advertisement during the election campaign in 2009. Many believe that the promise of being a clean political party was a factor behind the party’s victory in the last election.

Dwight R. Lee from Johns Hopkins University suggests that when advertising their “products” politicians tend to be less honest compared to businessmen. To put it another way, the incentives for politicians to lie about their “products” (campaign promises) to their “customers” (voters) tend to be greater than that for businessmen.

This is because consumers of political products are relatively easier to persuade than those of commercial products. This is believed to be caused by the fact that a choice made by a commercial-product consumer (compared to that made by a voter) is more related to the outcome in the sense that he will end up getting the desired product if he chooses it.

Consumers of political products, on the other hand, often do not have such a luxury since the chance
of getting what they vote for is very small particularly in a national election.

In many cases, this causes political product consumers (voters) to have little motivation (again, compared to commercial-product consumers) to be concerned about the accuracy of given political products and are more easily prey to the emotional appeal of such products.

Knowing this fact, political parties often use campaign means that are emotionally appealing to attract voters even though they may find it difficult to fulfill their political promises later on.

From the politicians’ point of view, in the case of Angelina, for example, many questions arise as to why a promising young politician such as herself ends up being a graft suspect.

Although her involvement in the alleged offenses is yet to be determined by the court, it is interesting to note how many political figures, once known as men of integrity, later on chose the path of corruption.

Many believe that this is caused by their exposure to the elements of the “fraud triangle”, pressure/motivation, opportunity and rationalization. In the case of Angelina as well as Nazaruddin, news coverage suggests that there might be a number of other political figures involved in the alleged bribery scheme that are yet to be identified and uncovered.

This indicates that the “this is how business is done around here” rationalization may have been used in the scheme.

Behavioral scientists have long studied the formation and structure of a fraud offender’s rationalization. Some of them believe that among the factors which constitute the rationalization of fraud are intuition and reasoning.

In committing their offense, fraud offenders sometimes do not care much about weighing the perceived “risk and return” but instead rely on their intuition to make the decision. An example of this is when one’s intuition tells one to obey one’s superiors out of loyalty despite the fact that it is against the existing rules or ethics.

Many who get involved in fraudulent conduct never wanted to be there in the first place, it was their blind obedience to their superiors that eventually dragged them to the dark side.

However, in other cases, fraudsters do act based on their reasoning and decide that the benefits of committing fraud outweigh the costs.

In the case of the athletes’ village scandal, such benefits may have been measured by the size of the “success fee” each of the participants in the bid-rigging scheme would receive against the possibility of being caught.

What is truly intriguing is the fact that the transformation from honesty to corruption may happen without the person realizing it because every stage of crossing over to the dark side is accompanied by rationalizations to ease or eliminate the feeling of guilt. Even offenders who have been incarcerated may still believe that they were wrongfully accused of corruption.

This calls for an integrated effort to build our future generation’s morals and ethics. The future fraudsters will be born of today’s generation and thus shaping their characters to meet the standard of righteousness from an early age will be an effective means of preventing them from turning corrupt in the future.

The writer is the director of the centre for forensic accounting studies at the accounting program of the Islamic University of Indonesia Yogyakarta. He obtained his masters and PhD in forensic accounting from the University of Wollongong, Australia