Finance and Accounting

The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam)’s definition of corruption draws from a wide variety of sources. The USAID’s Cambodian Corruption Assessment published in 2004 is one useful source. In this assessment, the authors describe the “all-encompassing corruption environment” in Cambodia in 2004. The assessment describes corruption from a variety of lenses and dimensions, one of which is the hoarding of or control over information.

Information can be a resource that is hoarded or controlled for inappropriate reasons that implicate corruptive behavior. For example, an individual or an organization can be given proprietary information of another organization, which undermines the fairness of competition for a particular opportunity. The information itself can be the resource that binds the recipient to the patron in a future, inappropriate patron-client relationship.

In the inverse, information on a particular competitive opportunity can be hoarded and released inappropriately piecemeal or not at all, in order to favor one person or entity over another for inappropriate or corrupt reasons. In sum, information can be as much a resource as money in terms of generating the dynamics that implicate unethical, exploitative, or even corrupt behavior. DC-Cam continues to see the many dimensions of corruption that were outlined in this Assessment of Cambodia in 2004, and it identifies this Assessment’s study of these dimensions as a useful reference in defining corruption in general.