When Well-Intentioned Legal Reform Goes Awry : A Case Study of Legal Loopholes and Challenges to Anti-Corruption Reform of Russia ’ s Complex Procurement System
law will always be found , and the process of their local blocking must occur all the time .
Key Lessons to Increase Transparency and Combat Corruption
In our opinion , the public procurement system should be as open as possible for entrepreneurs , and the ideas of many researchers about introducing additional barriers to procurement participants who are inexperienced or not having certain resources contradict the very principle of market competition , because the basic postulates of a market economy is the idea of creating perfect competition ( Andreeva , 2014 ; Belov , 2014 ; Chernyakova , 2014 ; Medvedeva , 2015 ; Morozyuk , 2015 ; Podrechnev , 2015 ). The elimination of unscrupulous market participants should be carried out not by applying formal requirements to them , but by high and documented requirements to the quality of the goods supplied or services provided .
The process of increasing transparency should be built simultaneously in two directions . On the one hand , we cannot escape the need to constantly block illegal circuits of circumvention of the law at the legislative level . And we have prepared a number of specific amendments to the law .
However , this process will be endlessly patching holes without working with underlying value orientations in society . In the review , it is necessary to carry out work on restructuring with an overly formalized approach to bearing responsibility for one ’ s own actions . Complex systems should be studied and designed with a realistic prediction of human behavior — we should expect that human behavior will drive individual actors to manipulate even the best law to serve their personal interests . Thus , it is necessary to start from this assumption , then apply it to the procurement system or any other complex social system — as they exist in the real world , not on a theoretical basis . In this case , we believe it is necessary to introduce such concepts as “ procurement efficiency ”, “ fair competition ”, “ nudity official ”, “ unfair restriction of competition ” in everyday life and into legislation . The use of these terms is not only in the formal document flow , but , to be more exact , in the value settings of society , without which it is really impossible to build an honest system of public procurement .
For comparison , we can add that much less formalized European public procurement laws provide far lower levels of corruption in these countries due to the fact that corruption is considered not a normal phenomenon , but something really shameful and blamed in society . Only when people stop to communicate with corrupt officials in a friendly way , stop to congratulate them on holidays , stop inviting them into communities , stop to respect them , only then even an imperfect law can bear fruits .
163