Granted, lifestyle audits can be a potent tool for managing corruption by public officials.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently announced in parliament that he would implement lifestyle audits on all cabinet ministers.
That’s the level where the South Africans want to start investigating discrepancies between official income and lifestyles of public officials.
Here in Kenya we are starting by conducting lifestyle audits on fairly low-level public officials- heads of accounting and procurement in the mainstream civil service and parastatals.
Will the experiment work? In June 2003, the then incoming government of former president Mwai Kibaki suspended all procurement officers to pave the way for tests on integrity.
Many months later, they were all re absorbed into public service.
We were not told whether the suspensions and integrity tests had achieved the purpose for which they were implemented.
Three years ago, National Police Commission chairman Johnson Kavuludi took the country through protracted police vetting hearings that were famous for sensational tales of discrepancies between official incomes and wealth acquired by police officers.
Months later, it was Mr Kavuludi himself who went on national television to admit that a good number of police officers who were retained in the service after going through the vetting process had gone back to engaging in corrupt activities.
Granted, lifestyle audits can be a potent tool for managing corruption by public officials.
But as the Kavuludi hearings clearly demonstrated, lifestyle audits are not the panacea for corruption especially when the vetting is applied indiscriminately across specific cadres of civil servants.
After all, we already have a framework for wealth declarations and a mechanism for prompting investigations in cases where a public official is found to be living beyond their means.
It is an open secret that procurement officials and accountants in government service are prone to corruption.
Yet the truth of the matter is that procurement decisions are usually made further up the hierarchy of decision making.
That is what Mr Ramaphosa realised by announcing that he would start lifestyle audits from the level of cabinet ministers.
If it is an open secret that government accountants and procurement officials are prone to corruption - then let’s also conduct lifestyle audits on staff with similar public perceptions such as customs officials, tax collectors- including civil servants working in departments that are usually not subjected to thorough audits such as the Department of Defence, National Intelligence Service and the External Debt Department at the National Treasury.
What is my point? It is that a blanket lifestyle audit process where all public officials in a specific cadre are targeted – and where the only reason they are being targeted is they are working in government service as accountants and procurement officers - is bound to be counterproductive.
In any event, doing a fair and credible job at vetting accountants and procurement officials is hard because the only civil servants you will net with the lifestyle audits are the unsophisticated staffers yet to learn how to hide their ill acquired wealth.
Today, the sophisticated types collude with their partners to work out complex schemes to conceal corrupt payments.
Substituting bribes for loans –usually- arranged through state-controlled banks is one such scheme.
In such arrangements, the loan is made to provide a legal appearance to a corrupt payment.
The actual bribe is then hidden through manipulation of repayment terms meant to give the impression that the loan is being serviced.
A bribe can also be concealed through hiding wealth in commercial bank nominee accounts, burying corrupt payments in client accounts with lawyers- or concealing it in a different transaction- for instance, in exchange of a commodity at a price above or below its market value.
My parting shot. Instead of sending accountants home, we should hire more accountants and task them with implementing and steering the transition from the antiquated cash-based accounting system that the government uses to accrual accounting.
Every time I visit a government office I always find myself laughing.
On every door is a list of equipment in that office. This rudimentary way is how the government keeps an asset register. Major reform of accounting and finance is how the government will reduce corruption.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
