Guyana ranked No. 1 for highest bribery rate in Caribbean

Guyana has been placed on the forefront for a number of years as it relates to bribery scandals where persons have had to pay to access Government services that should’ve been free.

The Inter-American Development Bank has now placed Guyana at the top spot in the Caribbean as the country with the highest bribery rate.

The IDB in a report published earlier this month also outlined that Guyana takes the longest to conduct business with the average time being more than five hours.
Entitled ‘Wait No More: Citizens, Red Tape and Digital Government’, the report stated that “Government transactions are a hotbed of corruption”.

The report cited manual government transactions, face-to-face interactions and the lack of standardised processes as the direct reasons for transactions being vulnerable to dishonest behaviour.

The IDB made reference to the 2019 Transparency International survey which showed that of the proportion of people in the five Caribbean countries surveyed; paying a bribe to access a public service was 18 percent.
“Corruption is everywhere: 29 percent of Latin Americans report having paid a bribe in the context of a public service in 2016…Data from this same survey shows that the percentage of people who pay bribes in exchange for services varies throughout the region: in Guyana, 27 percent of those surveyed said they had to pay a bribe to access a public service, the highest proportion in the region,” the report said.

According to the IDB, Guyana is followed by The Bahamas with a 20 percent bribery rate and 17 percent in both Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.

Barbados registered the lowest rate, with only nine percent of the surveyed reporting having paid a bribe to receive a public service. The report further explained that these rates also vary according to the service being requested.

Transparency International (2019) found that in the Caribbean, utilities recorded the highest rate of bribes. Nineteen percent of citizens reported having paid a bribe to access a service.

Fifteen percent of people paid a bribe to obtain an identity document, whereas for police services, this figure reached 18 percent.