Report on Corruption

Report corruption through a finding or a case rather than as an abstraction: what a survey found, or what a commission has charged. Then set out where it is worst, what it costs ordinary people, and what is being done. Attribution matters more here than anywhere else in the section.

The question: Write a report on corruption in our country.

The format

Report a finding, never an impression

Open with what a survey found or what a commission has charged, attributed in the same sentence. An unattributed statement that corruption is widespread is an opinion, and a report cannot carry one.

• Name the kind of organisation that produced the finding.
• Give the finding as a proportion, not a percentage you invented.
• 🚨 Every claim needs a source.

Name sectors, not people

The second paragraph reports which services the finding covers and what kind of payment respondents described. Sectors can be named because a survey named them; individuals cannot.

• Land registration and law enforcement are the standard examples.
• The distinction between paying for an entitlement and paying for an advantage is worth a sentence.

Commission, then the alternative view

Close with what the Anti-Corruption Commission says and what speakers argued works better. Reporting a disagreement is safer and more informative than asserting a remedy.

• One quotation from a researcher.
• ⚠️ Never name an individual as corrupt.

Model answer

Model answer (about 200 words)

Survey finds bribes common in service delivery

Staff Correspondent

Dhaka, 5 September: A large majority of households that sought services from certain public offices in the past year had to pay a bribe, according to a survey released by a governance research organisation on Thursday.

The survey, conducted among several thousand households across all divisions, reported that land registration and record offices, followed by law enforcement and some service utilities, were the sectors where irregular payments were most frequently reported. Respondents said payments were most often made to complete a service to which they were already entitled, rather than to obtain an improper advantage.

"The pattern is that people pay to be given what the law already gives them," a researcher associated with the study told this correspondent at the launch.

Officials of the Anti-Corruption Commission said complaint mechanisms had been strengthened and that a number of cases had been filed against public servants this year. Speakers at the launch, however, said digitising services so that fewer transactions require a face-to-face visit had done more to reduce petty bribery than enforcement, and called for that process to be extended.

What earns and loses marks

• Attribute absolutely everything in a corruption report. It is the topic where an unsourced statement most obviously becomes an allegation, and a report that makes allegations in its own voice has lost the register mark.
• Put the numbers in the first sentence. A news report leads with how many, where and when; anything else in the opening line is an essay opening in disguise.
• 🚨 Keep yourself out of it. “We should all be careful on the roads” is a sentence from a composition and loses the register mark immediately.
• Attribute every claim you could not have witnessed. Unattributed figures are the clearest sign of an invented report.
• About 180 to 220 words in four short paragraphs is the right length; newspaper paragraphs are short by convention.