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Payroll, Promotions, Appointments, Rewards

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Payroll, promotions, appointments and rewards are central issues of integrity for defence and security personnel.  Rewarding those who can pay, giving positions or money to those who have not earned it, and sabotaging others to preserve power are unethical and undermine defence and security establishments.  

 
Payroll is an obvious area of corruption risk; those who control money can often too easily misuse it. Corruption of payment can include the following: 
  • extracting percentages from the total cash for payroll
  • skimming from soldiers’ salaries
  • paying cronies from a secret payroll
  • paying ghost soldiers. The phenomenon of ghost soldiers arises when soldiers who have left the service remain on rosters to receive payment, however, the money does not go to the soldier or the soldiers’ family, but to other defence personnel (usually a superior).  The payroll can also be manipulated to include names of people who have never worked for the armed forces, or who do not even exist.

Appointment to a higher position brings with it authority, power, and usually higher pay. Risks in appointments and recruitment include the following:

  • Nepotism, favouritism, and clientelism, such as giving preferred postings and pre-rank promotions to relatives, friends, or those who can pay
  • Sabotaging personnel to preserve power and authority; resisting reforms for the same purpose
  • Paying fees to avoid military conscription, or paying fees to gain entry into peacekeeping forces
  • Using favours or fraud to gain entry into respected military educational institutions
  • Using favours or payment during the selection process for peace support operations or international missions

Payment or favours to gain rewards, or to avoid discipline, is a common risk in defence and security establishments. Means of corruption include the following:

  • Superiors extorting favours from subordinates
  • Using payments to avoid the disciplinary process or to be reinstated into a position
  • The misuse of the disciplinary process to remove threats to power
  • And the use of the reward process to endorse supporters.
All of the examples above have long-term effects on personnel; they undermine the confidence of staff, making them increasingly prone to participating in or condoning corruption. 
 

Corruption example: Ghost Soldiers in Uganda

An excerpt from TI-DSP's interview with Andrew Mwenda, Ugandan Journalist and editor of the Independent Current Affairs, in 2008:
“Uganda was involved in Southern Sudan under the permission of the Sudanese Government; this provided an opportunity to assess the scale of the ‘ghost soldiers’ problem to some extent. Under the Ugandan army establishment, a division is supposed to contain 7,000-8,000 troops; but when sent to Sudan, the actual number was about 2400 troops. In battle, this had disastrous consequences, because once the administrative coy, the sick and the injured are subtracted from the total, the force was only about 1200-strong, far below the figure which should have been present in that particular case.
 
In 2003, a Commission of Inquiry was appointed to investigate the existence of ghost soldiers on the army register. Estimates of the Ugandan Defence People’s Force in October 2003 suggested there was a total of 29,000 ghost soldiers on the payroll of the Ugandan Army – alternatively, that can be described as three divisions of ghost soldiers. This is indeed a crisis.”
 

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