Problems of the ACB
Internal Problems of the ACB
- Appointments are adhoc and generally inconvenient officers are shunted here.
- Tenure of the ACB boss or other officials posted to the ACB is not fixed.
- A posting to the ACB is considered as a punishment posting as it is a deliberately crippled organisation. It is kept under strength. It has very few computers, vehicles or other resources such as communication facilities with the field offices or personnel on the move. The Mumbai office is the only office which is somewhat adequate. Consequently nobody wants to be posted outside Mumbai.
- There is only one assistant public prosecutor attached to the entire ACB for the whole state of Maharashtra. One legal officer cannot take the burden of representing the organisation properly in courts.
- Legal training is weak for the officials and the clerical/constabulary staff who are posted on an adhoc basis to the ACB.
- The fight against corruption needs a dedicated cadre of personnel with special skills. Specially white collar corruption which is increasing day by day.
- The ACB has only one field office location for the whole of Mumbai which has a population almost equal to that of Australia (16 million approximately)
- The outdated Indian Evidence Act hampers a lot and new methods of collecting evidence using new technologies such as mikes and CCD cameras etc are non existent.
- The track record of the anti corruption bureau is very poor. The conviction rate is not even 10% of the cases filed. Only 400 to 500 cases are made or filed annually though many cases are unreported or not taken up in a population of 6 crore plus and rampant corruption.
- In case of a trap set by the ACB to catch the corrupt red handed, bribe money gets locked up due to the procedures involved in court and the victim of corruption is unduly harassed specially when he is poor. Change of procedures by producing the bribe amount as evidence in front of any magistrate within 5 days of the detection of the act of corruption (trap) will lead to less harassment of the general public and higher cooperation from the complainants. After recording the evidence, the magistrate’s record should be accepted by the court in subsequent hearings and the money returned to the complainant immediately. A complainant’s time and energy are not taken into consideration while fighting corruption. The fight against corruption needs to be made citizen centric instead of Govt centric at present OR the state should pay the complainant daily an equivalent amount which he loses due to delay by the state authorities after the case starts.
- Statistics on all cases being fought on the war against corruption cannot be maintained due to lack of a single authority for this purpose. Cases relating to departmental misconduct in various state government undertakings and organizations should also be reported in the filing system of the ACB so that corruption and action taken can be measured. Only proper measurement will lead to a better analysis of the problem and help the war against corruption.
- The ACB website does not have a convenient way to check the status of a complaint by a complainant or any visitor. Plus a complainant cannot be informed easily or automatically via an email alert, an SMS message or a voice recording in case of being required to appear for a hearing or any other official matter. On the CVC website one can check the status of a complaint.
- Profiles of key officials of the ACB are not available at the website unlike the case at the CVC website.
- We have never heard of action being taken against corrupt ACB officials themselves who have diluted cases any number of times leading to the ACB’s own poor performance record.
External Problems of the ACB
- The ACB also does not have any control on the internal Vigilance officers of various state govt undertakings who are in some cases of the same seniority or even senior to the ACB boss. There is no way to access an uptodate civil list of ALL the vigilance officers of the state at one place and know how many of these crucial posts are vacant. Though there is an updated list of Vigilance officers of the central organisations at the CVC site.
- The public prosecutor’s office which also comes under the State Home Ministry does not cover special cases of high profile corruption. There is no provision for the ACB to have a special prosecutor for high profile cases such as in the US.
- Permission needs to be taken for prosecuting any higher official from the state govt which is not easily forthcoming or is generally never given which destroys the case totally.
- The Anti Corruption Bureau and the Central Bureau of Investigation do not coordinate properly and their functions are hardly known. The local CBI office contact details are not shown on the ACB’s website nor can CBI be conveniently contacted. The ACB also does not have any links with the state CID.
- Income tax deptt and the audit department of the state do not correspond or work with the ACB. The ACB has yet to have a dedicated arm for investigating cases of disproportionate assets. There is no formal linkup with the federal department of Revenue Intelligence. ( DRI) which comes under the union finance ministry.
- No action is ever taken on the reports of the state audit department and its reports are not easy to get. The audit deptt is not a statutory body and its findings are never acted upon since the ACB has not got any legal sanction to go deeper into the matter of wastage of public monies as found by the auditor’s reports on its own. If the ACB was a statutory body, it would have this freedom of action.
- There is no computerised database which is accessible to the officers of the ACB for tracking benami properties and money laundering cases. For tracking financial transactions, the ACB has to depend on the state home ministry’s police wing for white collar crimes which is known as the economic offences wing but is also seriously hampered. The federal income tax deptt and the DRI are not linked to the ACB. Nor is the state sales tax and excise deptt via the state finance ministry linked to the ACB for investigating disproportionate assets.