An Anti-Corruption Conference by TEPAV During the conference, representatives from the public and private sectors and non-governmental organizations discussed the perception of, the legality of, and the struggle against corruption.

ANKARA – TEPAV held an Anti-Corruption Conference on Friday, 8 November 2013, attended by representatives from the public sector, private sector, and civil society.

Delivering the opening remarks, TEPAV Director Güven Sak said that TEPAV had been working on anti-corruption since nearly its inception and that the view that  “some level of corruption is bearable with economic development” that was common in Turkey had started to expire, though slowly. At the present, Sak said, civil society and the private sector were developing a consciousness about anti-corruption.

Moderated by TEPAV Governance Studies Director Emin Dedeoğlu, the conference consisted of three sessions: “Legislation, Understanding and Implementation in Anti-Corruption: Developments and Challenges,” “The All-Out Perspective of Corruption: The State, the Private Sector, and NGOs,” and “The All-Out Approach to Anti-Corruption: The State, the Private Sector, and NGOs.”

In the first session, Prime Ministry Chief Inspector R. Bülent Tarhan stated that institutional structures in Turkey were relatively successful at unraveling corruption, but unsuccessful in purging the system that reproduced corruption. He said that the solution was stuck between the “single authority” approach and the “multi-institutional structure” approach. “To overcome problems of coordination, assigning one of the existing institutions as coordinator can be considered as an option to reorganizing the institutional structure.”

“The Commission has not been consulted since 2003”

Professor Muhittin Acar of Hacettepe University said that the Parliament’s Anti-Corruption Commission had not been “needed” or consulted in the last decade and stated that the reasons for this lack of interest should be questioned as a first step. Stressing that corruption was still considered a “casualty of development” in developing countries, whereas the harm of corruption had been highlighted more in the EU during the latest global crisis, Acar said that what Turkey needed was a broad definition that covered civil society among others, and political commitment. He added that despite the view that corruption diminished along with technological advancement, the optimism did not hold for big auctions.

TEPAV Governance Studies Analyst Emre Koyuncu delivered the first speech of the second session, during which he shared with the audience the results of the “Public Services and Corruption in the Eyes of the Household – 2013 Survey.”

Bahadır Topal, representative of the Public Sector Internal Auditors Association, stated that an important reform for anti-corruption had been introduced in 2003 with the Law Number 5018 and that the structure of Internal Auditing Coordination Board had to be strengthened in this context. He drew attention to the organizational and budgetary problems of internal audit units. He called for closer cooperation between different units, including the departments of inspection, internal auditing, and controlling.

The need for a declaration of principles for the private sector …

Speaking during the last session, Tayfun Zaman, Secretary General of the Ethics and Reputation Society, complained that the training they offered had not been translated into practice and added that despite having procedural documents of hundreds of pages, private sector companies did not have an open “declaration of policies and principles.” Pointing at the current problem of disreputation, he added “anomalies might occasionally turn into norms. To solve this, we need to make larger effort than that required by domestic law.”

Pilot project: “Letter of Commitment to Ethics for Customs Brokers”

Atilla Şahin, Head of Executive Board of the Customs Brokers Association, delivered a presentation titled “How Effective is Professional Solidarity in Anti-corruption? A Case Study.” He stated that the Association had asked its members to sign a Letter of Commitment to Ethics, according to which “they [would] act in conformity with the principles of business ethics, anti-corruption and money-laundering,” which so far had been signed by about half of the members. He added that the Association was willing to become a professional association.

The last keynote speaker of the conference was Assoc. Prof. Besim Bülent Bali of Doğuş University. He said that civil society organizations that worked specifically on anti-corruption were relatively new, which implied a lack of knowledge, experience, and technical capacity for efficiency as well as of financial resources. He noted that European countries that were relatively weaker in anti-corruption used statements of commitment to enhance and supervise relevant structures, state-NGO cooperation, and the support of citizens and other NGOs for anti-corruption activities of the civil society.

Following each presentation, a debate session was held with the questions and contributions of the audience.