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Not much to see here. Crowd sourced, vibe coded app. Not sure what "verified" means because the only verification they did was require a checkbox that "I confirm this is a genuine experience"
Fair on "verified" - it's really "manually reviewed" (duplicate/outlier checks), not independently verified. Should probably fix that word on the site.
"Manually reviewed" isn't much better honestly, still sounds more rigorous than a checkbox. Maybe just call it "self-reported, spot-checked" and move on.
I'm a lawyer.
I deal with government officials on behalf of clients.
I will give a different context of it.
Many people "do actually" commit tax fraud. It's just real.
Then you have people who don't do "compliance" and government officials see this as potential cash cow.
Then you have third category of "clients". These people just are unlucky. The officer "wants" to get a certain sum of money as bribes so they are indiscriminate in who they target. Any fully compliant client "has to" pay to avoid "further complications" and they quietly pay because they don't want hassles.
This website was built by end users who see "oh why do I have to pay a bribe" when most likely they have committed tax fraud and just want to be quiet about it.
Example.
People calling fake deductions in their income tax returns or giving fake donations and claiming deductions. People often say "oh I didn't know" but it'd actually tax fraud so why not face full music of the law if you do it?
If I were a corrupt official in one of the departments I would simply use a vpn and submit a bunch of data for my specific specialty all across the country and then slightly fewer in my own department to drive demand and set market expectations
Counterpoint: if they have that much tech expertise and competency managing things they would have left and make more money doing more productive things :)
No worries, we made same mistake first version of our app, hardcoded "state" instead of country. Cost us a rewrite when first non-US customer signed up.
A lot of people in western countries are unaware of how bad corruption is in the developing world.
It's not uncommon for something like 80% of government officials of all types to be corrupt, compared to under 5-10% in the west.
Go to one of these countries and you'll see it for yourself first hand if you ever deal with the government in any capacity.
You may start to see the same thing in the west with idelologues such as Trump, who care more about loyalty and power than corruption. He has already removed a lot of checks and balances in the system.
A lot of western people start operating in emerging markets to save on labor costs but then get crabby when there is a ton of bureaucracy and it's much harder to operate in compared to the US and EU.
Then they will have local people in their ear saying "just do this" and "this" is something not legal/ethical.
Saw this with Slashdot karma and those old "worst company" polls back in the 2000s. Rank anything and people start optimizing for the rank, not the underlying signal.
I could see no bribes in my city. Where is this data sourced from? Also its just showing city and department name. Can't find name or photo of person who took the bribe.
can someone guide me to the developer of this website? i am zaheen from Indian express and i would like to talk to the maker of this app. here's my contact info zaheenlakhnavi@gmail.com
It's because Western governments do a much better job of legitimizing their corruption or just doing it "transparently" (which makes it okay, you see?).
Best example is registered lobbying. If you have the money, you absolutely can brazenly bribe politicians and not only is it okay, in the United States its been backed by the highest courts as a form of "expression".
Bribing is okay in the West because its not bribing, its legitimized entirely with weasel words like "lobbying" or "fundraising". As long as you're "transparent" about it then its fine.
Relative poverty and enforcement: if a cop accepts a bribe they can lose their job. It’s not worth accepting £20 (or even £2000) bribe and forfeit larger future earnings.
So when bribes do happen it’s for much greater amounts (or nebulous, hard-to-trace things like favours), which rules out bribes for minor infractions.
Self-reported corruption surveys have a known problem: officials most exposed to bribery often underreport, and crowdsourced ones skew toward disgruntled citizens. Interesting data, but treat cross-department rankings as noisy, not authoritative.
