Corruption in the Philippines is so pervasive that, according to experts, it now requires an outsider with a formidable background and, perhaps, no known local roots to deal with it.

Manila: Filipinos, like most other people, do not generally take kindly to outsiders telling them what is wrong with them. So it was a bit of a surprise when almost no one here complained that a former official from Hong Kong had been advising the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on how to combat corruption in the Philippines.

According to officials and experts, the appointment of Tony Kwok to oversee the government’s anti-corruption campaign in the next three years demonstrates the seriousness of the problem in the Philippines.

Kwok is the former head of Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption and is widely credited for checking corruption in the Chinese territory.

Corruption in the Philippines is so pervasive that, according to these experts, it now requires an outsider with a formidable background and, perhaps, no known local roots to deal with it.

Kwok’s arrival also indicates how important cooperation is among countries in the region in the fight against corruption, as they tend to draw lessons from each other’s experiences, the experts say.

Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand have consistently fared better in corruption ratings; the Philippines has always been a bottom-dweller, along with Indonesia and Vietnam.

Perhaps more significantly for the Philippines, the success of the campaign could enable it to catch up economically with its more prosperous neighbors and to erase finally the stigma of corruption that it acquired during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos – a reputation that has not quite evaporated after almost two decades of attempts to rebuild the institutions the Marcos regime destroyed and to reinstitute transparency and good governance.

Corruption has consistently been cited as one of the main reasons investors are often unwilling to make capital commitments, why the bureaucracy is weak and why Filipinos are among the worst off in the region.

“Tony Kwok did a good job in Hong Kong,” said Emil Bolongaita, a governance specialist who has extensively studied corruption in Southeast Asia. “He is very strong-willed.”

At the very least, Bolongaita said, Kwok’s contribution to the administration’s campaign can provide encouragment to make the government think “that this fight can be won.”

According to officials, the Arroyo administration has been trolling for some time for talent in the region to help eradicate graft. It studied, for instance, how Singapore became the least corrupt country in Southeast Asia. The administration first approached Kwok in 2003, a year after he retired from the Hong Kong commission, to give workshops and seminars.

“Corruption can be eradicated,” Kwok told a group of businessmen in Manila on Tuesday. “We did it in Hong Kong. It can be done here in the Philippines.”

In a speech this week, an upbeat Arroyo declared: “Tony says, with our political will and working together, what Hong Kong was able to do in seven years, we could perhaps be able to do in three years.” She added: “We shall win this war against corruption.”

But it is not going to be easy. Corruption in the Philippines is viewed as a “low-risk, high-return crime.” A 2004 report by the UN Development Program said that as much as 100 billion pesos, or $1.8 billion – 13 percent of the government’s 780-billion-peso annual budget – is lost to corruption every year, most of it in public-works contracts, supplies and equipment.

Several departments lose from 10 percent to 65 percent of their project or supply costs to bribes and kickbacks.

Businessmen, according to surveys, use as much as 20 percent of a cost of a government contract to pay bribes while nearly 60 percent of them say that they would bribe officials just to get a government contract.

On the other hand, corrupt government workers are largely untouched. Three years ago, an anti-graft court called the Sandiganbayan convicted only 6 percent of the suspects prosecuted by an ombudsman. And those who go to jail are usually small-time criminals.

Studies of corruption have blamed many things, including Marcos, political patronage, nepotism and the Filipinos’ tendency to forget the wrongdoings of their leaders. Some suggest that corruption has become part of Filipino culture, from paying off government clerks just to get a birth certificate to bribing a police officer for a minor traffic infraction.

“Filipinos have accepted corruption as a way of life,” said Teresita Baltazar, commissioner of the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission, which has been investigating presidential appointees.

Because the successive administrations after Marcos were unstable and because government institutions remained weak, corruption in the Philippines became unpredictable.

The tumultuous transitions in government, for example, leave businessmen not knowing whom they would deal with next, so they simply decide to leave or to hold off on investments.

Steven Rood, country representative of The Asia Foundation, which also has a strong anticorruption advocacy program in the region, said the political, bureaucratic and economic institutions “have not changed as much as was hoped back in 1986.”

The administration has been implementing some of these reforms.

Simeon Marcelo, the ombudsman, has been working in tandem with Kwok, increasing his office’s work force and devising new prosecutorial strategies.

An agency that is supposed to oversee how 1.5 million public employees conduct themselves, the Office of the Ombudsman before Marcelo had only 32 full-time prosecutors and 37 poorly trained field investigators.

Its annual budget was only 380 million pesos, compared, for example, with the equivalent of a 4.9 billion-peso budget for its counterpart in Hong Kong, which had to deal with only 174,000 government employees.

The Office of the Ombudsman had a 6 percent conviction rate. Worse, Filipinos generally did not trust the office, perhaps because some of its top officials were themselves the subject of corruption accusations.

Since his appointment in 2002, Marcelo has more than doubled the number of prosecutors and investigators.

The conviction rate increased to 42 percent by the first quarter of this year.

Similar efforts are under way elsewhere. The Revenue Integrity Protection Service, a finance-department arm that investigates corrupt revenue and customs employees, is seeking more powers from Congress, such as the authority to check the bank accounts of revenue workers without necessarily having a court order.

The Revenue Integrity Protection Service, a finance-department arm that investigates corrupt revenue and customs employees, is seeking more powers from Congress, such as the authority to check the bank accounts of revenue workers without necessarily having a court order.

Carlos H. Conde, International Herald Tribune, May 20, 2005