Who is more likely to jeopardise their career? Identifying conditions for being sanctioned for corruption in the Brazilian federal civil service

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Abstract

Internal controls are frequently seen as a principle of good governance and an important tool for preventing, detecting, and punishing misbehaviour inside organisations. However, their impact on tackling corruption remains disputed. By asking who are sanctioned for corruption and which conditions differentiate them from those punished for other serious offences, this paper identifies the distribution of severe penalties enforced between 2003 and 2014 based on certain individual characteristics of civil servants accused of misconduct in the Brazilian federal executive. This paper presents a more formal statistical analysis in which we explore parametric models to estimate as a Logit via Maximum Likelihood Estimation the conditions on being punished with dismissals, demotions and loss of pension for acts of corruption. Therefore, the analysis is performed for the subsamples of sanctions enforced by gender, years working as a civil servant, status (meritocratically recruited or not), special position (holders of position of trust or not) and gross earnings, for which estimated results for the effects of each of these variables will be presented. The analysis and discussion also integrate qualitative data based on the perception of civil servants directly involved with disciplinary actions through 25 semi-structured interviews.

Author

• Fernanda Odilla, King's College London