Bribery as a problem of ethics in public administration

The study focuses on the examination of the bribe as an ethical, ethical in public management, and non ethical behavior within an institutional frame formed by collection of the resources related to the subject. For this purpose, a study based on research aiming at investigating what are the most common unethical behaviors in Turkish public administration, bribery methods, the purposes for giving bribery, what are evaluated in the scope of the bribery, institutionalization degree of the bribery, the reasons of the bribery, and the measures to be taken for preventing the bribery.A period of change is experienced in almost every domain in today?s world. This process of change causes positive and negative results in societal, political, economical, and cultural domains. Public administrations are also negatively affected from this process. The importance of ethics has been increased along with negative effects becoming widespread through this process; the prevention of ethical and unethical behaviors in public administration has become an important investigation area.The ethics, by its easiest definition, is a discipline examining our value judgment that we call as good, bad, right, and wrong in societal relations. However, it is possible to define public administration ethics as performing all kinds of actions related to the assigned positions of public officers by melting laws and individual ethical values in a pot.The bribery appearing in unethical behaviors takes place among the most important problems in public administration. The bribery putting an important obstacle before economical, political, and social development has reasons stemming from bureaucratic, social, economical, political, cultural, and judicial structures. Among these reasons, ethical corruption experienced in social area, malfunctions experienced in the operation of the public administration, insufficiency of public opinion supervision, financial difficulties of public servants, centralist management mentality, deficiencies related to fidelity to state of law perception, and the problems arising from the structure of political system and its functioning come to the front.The bribery defined as a corruption towards obtaining pecuniary advantages causes the failure of public services, makes public services more expensive, decreases the confidence in public administration, slows the economical growth, reduces the entry of foreign capital, tax incomes, the effectiveness of the public investments, betrays the trust to public institutions, public managers, and to the justice, and leads to moral corruption in the society.The most common bribery methods in public administration come to the front by bribe offer made by customer through mediators, without receipt under the name of donation, by means of acquaintances, and the demand of public servant. On the other hand, the bribe is given in order to accelerate the transactions, to obtain something unmerited, to avoid from sanctions, and to do someone injustice.Performance of an incumbent transaction by a public servant against an interest, and performance of a transaction that must not be done by a public servant against an interest are defined as bribery, while tip taken at the completion of the work, acceptance of presents from the owners of the work, and favoring friends and acquaintances by a public servant are not always evaluated as bribery.The measures such as aggravating and activating legal sanctions for fighting against the bribery, simplifying public processes, ameliorating financial rights of the public servants, forming infrastructure for developing ethical culture in the public administration, activating the public opinion, ensuring the localization, providing openness and transparency in the public administration must be taken. However, the fight against the bribery must be handled and determinedly maintained in a long termed process where the participation of all of the related actors is ensured.