WHAT'S up, Immigration Department? As the years go by, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) is arresting more and more enforcement officers for being in league with smuggling syndicates.
On Saturday, this newspaper headlined the arrest of 37 Immigration enforcement officers for allegedly colluding with a syndicate to smuggle foreign nationals through airports. Twenty-seven of the arrested enforcers were men, while the rest were women. Corruption in the department, once a preserve of men, has now jumped gender.
The MACC seized over RM1 million, of which RM970,000 was recovered from just three enforcers. That was not all. You name it, they had it: branded watches, jewellery, gold bars, dinar coins, cars and motorcycles. The cash is believed to be bribes from the smuggling syndicate operating at Kuala Lumpur International Airport terminals 1 and 2, whose notoriety for illegal entry and exit of foreign workers are well known.
Just to jog the memory of those who matter in the department, in November 2020, 27 enforcers were arrested, again, for colluding with a syndicate, only this time, to help foreign workers with expired work visas remain in the country. Like all corrupt officers, the 27 were into opulence, made possible by the syndicate's gravy train.
We often hear the authorities tell us that they have crippled this or that syndicate. Perhaps, they mean that they were made lame, not destroyed, as we would like to think. Hardly a month passes before another syndicate rears its ugly head. Syndicates reappear because some within are corrupt or corruptible. Both need to be weeded out.
Over the years directors-general of the department have done much to thwart the corruption that has taken root there. But the "much" isn't working. The scale and frequency of arrests tell us corruption is pervasive. Do not go blaming the MACC. After all, it is a graft-buster, not graft-preventer. The latter is the job of the head of department. The MACC has tried to be a graft-preventer by embedding its officers in certain public institutions.
This isn't working as envisaged. A better approach to stopping corruption from becoming an ingrained culture of impunity is to make supervisors and managers at every level accountable for the misdeeds of their staff. This way, no syndicate could grease the palms of enforcers.
But this seems to be a hard-to-do thing for the public service, not just the department. The recent arrest of Kuala Lumpur City Hall's deputy director of enforcement says a lot about the lack of accountability of heads of department there.
Another is to make the recruitment process more robust. Personality tests and psychological profiling are two new ways of doing this.
These methods may not guarantee that only the good will get in, but at least they would ensure that most of the bad would be kept out.
Even if only the unbribable are recruited, the corrupt already in the system would soon make them corrupt, especially if the new recruits have them as their managers. The public service must find a way to jettison them. Only in this way, public entities such as the Immigration Department can be made fit for its purpose.