Last November, the Commission for Investigation of the Abuse of Authority (CIAA) lost its cases against two politicians: Khum Bahadur Khadka and Govinda Raj Joshi.

Citing an old law, the then Special Court said that a public officer could only be slapped with a corruption-related lawsuit within one year of his leaving office. Since that length of time had elapsed in the case of both Joshi and Khadka, the court let them go free. The court’s message to the CIAA was, “You guys were late in filing these lawsuits.”

Chastened, in part, by that experience, the CIAA seems to have lost no time last June in hauling up the governor and executive director (ED) of the Central Bank before a court on charges of corruption. The governor and the ED have since been suspended. Released on bail, they are awaiting trials. Meantime, it is worth commenting on two signals one can peel off the CIAA’s letter of accusation, which it submitted on 29 June.

The workflow problem: The CIAA’s charge can be reframed not as an issue of corruption per se but as a workflow problem. That is, the failure on the bank’s part to file, index and follow up on a piece of work that it had contracted out. This failure could well be attributed to the bank’s negligent attitude toward the task of crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s.

In its letter, the CIAA lays out what the accused did not do to claim appropriate damages from ‘dubious’ foreign consultants, who had been paid large sums of donor money despite having done unsatisfactory work. Assuming this were true, it would be game to question the effectiveness of the bank’s internal monitoring system. But to use this broad governance issue as a narrow platform from which to pounce on the top brass smacks of a gotcha attitude that only showcases the CIAA’s hurried eagerness to catch big fish at the expense of its own credibility.

The oversight issue: The Central Bank has its oversight committees and its own board of directors. Their collective job is to ensure that the work that the Bank does or contracts out conforms to appropriate procurement and delivery requirements. That the CIAA gave a clean pass to all others, who were also responsible for oversight work, and chose to zero in on two individuals make it vulnerable to the counter-charges that it is settling unidentified personal scores under the lofty guise of battling corruption. Even after assuming that the accused were indeed corrupt, it’s hard to see how they could have done what they did without others at the bank being complicit in some way.

These score settling activities are all too believable given that almost all of CIAA’s staff members are on deputation from government ministries. This means that the members’ long-term incentive is to stay loyal to their possible future bosses (i.e. politicians and bureaucrats), who, it’s no secret, can use the CIAA to get rid of rivals and nuisances.

To be sure, smarting over the loss of major corruption cases in the last three years, the CIAA wants a big win this time. It has never had any problem garnering press coverage for its initial arrests. But the many of its wins have come from a mundane strand of work: verifying government officers’ educational credentials. Though the CIAA may hope that this particular case will be its crowning achievement, chances are high that a bench of judges will ultimately say, “You came to court too early with inadequate homework.” 

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