Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

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After going through the process of building a house in CA, I believe we should decriminalize offering of bribes, but not solicitation of bribes.

$100K’s of dollars (>> 10% of the total project cost) have been extracted from us by various bureaucratic processes that are outside what is explicitly specified by the law.

I am confident that this would not have happened if we were well politically connected, and had friends that worked at PG&E.

I honestly don’t know if we were “just supposed to know” that we needed to make some specific charitable or political donation or something like that, because no one has explicitly solicited a bribe from us.

If it were legal to offer bribes, I could go online, and search for information on who to pay off, and to what ends.

Even better, California could fix the law to eliminate these gray areas. In the Apple case, they could move from “may issue” to “shall issue”.

In my case, there could be bounds on permit review durations, and also the cost / benefit of “environmental” regulations: if some ask is too expensive homeowners could “buy credits” by doing something else that would be more effective for the same amount of money.

To be clear, the money they extracted from us for “the environment” will substantially increase our carbon footprint, impact on local wildlife and on the watershed — we planned to voluntarily spend that money to mitigate those impacts because we’re extremely concerned about the environment. Now, we’ve been forced to waste it in low impact ways. I’m not upset that we were forced to spend the money. I’m upset it was wasted.

I live in a developing country with a ton of bribery that is way, way down the Transparency International rankings.

Your ideas come across as pretty naive and out of touch with how bribery works in the real world. Which is okay, not everyone is an expert on everything. But your comment would come across a lot better if you had used some tentative language instead of definitive language on a topic it is clear you don't know much about in the real world.

Bribes are rarely solicited in the real world, so that's the first place you theory falls down. I've only rarely had someone say something that could even vaguely be construed as soliciting a bribe. They aren't dumb, after all. Instead what usually happens is you get a run-around for unspecified reasons until you offer the bribe. You submit the paperwork and they tell you it is filled in incorrectly but don't tell you what part is wrong or how to fill it in correctly. The nurse only checks on you once a day until you give her an envelope of cash. The accountants auditing your books ask for receipts of every single everything until take them to dinner and offer them a present for all the hard work they've done so far. The fire department finds all kinds of ways to not certify your new office for occupancy until you give them some "coffee money".

The second problem with you theory of bribery is the offering bribes changes the structure of compensation dramatically. The expectation of receiving bribes becomes part of the expected total compensation for a position. But this gray money -- the delta between official compensation and bribes -- becomes a revenue stream that everyone above you on the hierarchy can and will tap into.

In practice this means you have to pay a huge bribe to get any job. Where I live, to get a job as a police officer, or a nurse, or a flight attendant, you have to pay a bribe to whoever is hiring. Not a small bribe. Like a year of salary. Which means either you come from a family rich enough to have that kind of money laying around or borrow money from a money-lender.

How do you get the money to pay back the money-lender? By taking bribes, of course.

Your boss knows approximately how much you're making in bribes each month and will expect you to pass it along every month. After all, he borrowed a ton of money to pay a bribe to get his promotion and needs to pay off that debt.

And if you're complaining about >10% of the total project cost going to bureaucratic processes, your idea would result in 30% or more of the total project cost going to bribery. Since that's exactly what happens here.

I second this description. Bribery and corruption in Vietnam is endemic. A new employee gets a job by paying their first year’s salary. That means they have to collect bribes to survive. After their first year collecting bribes, they habit is engrained.

Edit: I just noticed you are also in Vietnam. So sad for such an otherwise lovely place.

If people paying had no legal incentive to keep their bribe private after the fact, then accepting a bribe would be much riskier than it currently is in the US.

Once it became common knowledge that some officials were extracting bribes, it would be simple to jail them.

After all, if I paid a bribe, and it was legal to pay it, but illegal to receive it, I’d certainly document the payment as well as I could.

After the house was built, you can bet I’d try to recoup my funds, and also figuratively burn the county office to the ground by pursuing every option I could in the press and in court.

I don’t think I’m naive as you think. The officials in this area behave exactly as you describe. The difference in my situation is that, if there was concrete evidence of bribery at the planning office, it would be prosecuted and it would make headlines (just as the bribery case in the article did.)

Local governments that withhold building permits and corruption at PG&E have become so politically contentious that the state government has had to repeatedly intervene.

> I believe we should decriminalize offering of bribes

I too would like to erode confidence in our public servants.

It's become far too difficult for public servants to extort me, something needs to change.

Can you be more specific? The experience I had with house construction permitting in a big California city was completely above-the-table and reasonable.

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