December 6, 2024 | 12:00am
It sounds like an oxymoron to describe our government as smart. Smart is being used here to dream about a government almost totally managed by artificial intelligence programmed to wipe out corruption and vastly improve how the government provides services to the people.
With all the news of how AI will render a lot of people jobless, we can dream of having AI make the corrupt people in our government jobless instead.
We should watch closely how Elon Musk manages his Department of Government Efficiency because he is going to use a lot of technology and common sense. A lot of the reforms they are planning to implement may be useful for us. The American bureaucracy obviously has a lot of fat and ours is patterned after theirs.
I asked ChatGPT if AI can be used to run a country more efficiently and without corruption. ChatGPT’s response:
Yes, AI has the potential to help run a country more efficiently and reduce corruption. Here’s how AI can reduce corruption:
Transparency and accountability: AI systems could monitor public spending and government activities in real-time, flagging any anomalies or patterns that suggest corruption. For instance, AI can help track financial transactions, procurement processes and public contracts, ensuring that there is no embezzlement or favoritism involved.
Predictive analytics: AI could be used to predict potential corruption risks by analyzing historical patterns, relationships and social dynamics. Governments could proactively intervene before corruption scandals unfold.
Actually, even without AI, we can realize savings of one to two trillion pesos by just abolishing Congress or making membership become a serious financial sacrifice.
Let’s require personal financial transparency including a waiver of bank secrecy rights and just a token salary in line with the public service nature of being in Congress. Today, Congress is the biggest corruption source in our government. And then go after confidential funds, including those allocated to the President.
AI aside, if we want to fight corruption, everything starts with the Ombudsman. But whoever holds that office must be determined to clean up our government. Otherwise, the Ombudsman becomes the biggest obstacle to good governance. The term of the current Ombudsman is ending next year. Hopefully, the replacement has the reputation and the determination to fight corruption.
BBM should be thinking legacy as he approaches the midterm of his presidency. Successfully dealing with corruption has to be the one thing that will forever assure his place in history regardless of whatever happened in the past. That means having the courage to appoint an Ombudsman who is not part of his party or not one of his friends. Appointing Tony Carpio or Leila de Lima will make people take notice that BBM must mean business. These two people are not likely to have sacred cows to protect, something that unfortunately happened with a number of past appointees to the position.
The Ombudsman should work very closely with the Commission on Audit. Indeed, these offices should develop an AI system that will bring the anti-corruption drive into the digital age. They should widen the scope of their responsibilities to cover not just what happened in the case of the Pharmally scandal but also horrible examples of bureaucratic negligence that resulted in massive losses like the recent COA report of how the Department of Health wasted P11 billion of our taxes on expired medicines and vaccines.
I had to pay for my bivalent vaccine in Singapore because DOH refused to administer what they had in stock, only to have those expire. A good part of the wasted DOH supplies are 7,035,161 vials of COVID-19 vaccines. The bulk of these were procured by the DOH Central Office while 1.5 million were donations.
Also wasted were 24,538 bags of donated dialysis solution worth P37,561.409.33 which expired in 2023. These are obviously because of inadequate procurement planning and poor distribution and monitoring systems that resulted in such a sorry waste of government funds and resources, as COA observed. Donor governments and organizations will hesitate to donate because we just waste the donations paid for by their taxpayers.
Maybe the next secretary of health shouldn’t be a doctor of medicine but a management expert with the ability to run that bureaucracy. The solutions to our health concerns, like PhilHealth, require financial and management expertise. Dr Alran Bengzon, a former SOH, had something good in mind when he incorporated an MBA in the MD degree offered by the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health. Alran was himself a good manager-physician as well as a visionary. How he turned the small ABM Sison Hospital into Medical City is his legacy.
The best way to fight corruption with or without AI is to reduce the role of government. In agriculture, we can apply the rice tariffication model to pork, beef and chicken. Follow the example of India. They transferred the agriculture budget from paying bureaucrats and funding complicated programs to a simple direct cash transfer to farmers.
Or we can study how Javier Milei, who has been president of Argentina for a year, is doing it.
The Economist reports that “Milei campaigned wielding a chainsaw and he has cut public spending by almost a third in real terms, halved the number of ministries and engineered a budget surplus. There has been a bonfire of red tape, liberating markets from housing rentals to airlines. The results are encouraging. Inflation has fallen from 13 percent month on month to three percent. Investors’ assessment of the risk of default has halved. A battered economy is showing signs of recovery.”
In the end, AI is still managed by humans. We still have to vote for the right people. We need our own Milei.
Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco
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