According to Dane, Colombians believe that corruption has increased in recent years

Dane revealed on March 30 the Political Culture survey, where interesting data on politics, democracy and perception of corruption came out. According to the survey, for the national total, in 2021, 73.2% of people over the age of 18 perceived that the level of corruption increased in the last year, while in 2019 this percentage stood at 64.9%.

22.8% of respondents stated that the level of corruption remained the same and 1.4% said it decreased. For 2019, these percentages stood at 28.4% and 3.7%, respectively.

In turn, by 2021, in the national total, 40.6% of the population considered that in the area or issue where the most serious cases of corruption in the public sector occur is in health. Disaggregated by geographical domain, this percentage was 44.6% in populated and dispersed rural centers and 39.5% for municipal capitals. Corruption cases in the area of justice had the second highest share in the national total, with 28.1%; by geographical domain it was 29.5% in headwaters and 22.9% in populated centers and dispersed rural areas.

For their part, in 2021, for the national total, of the people surveyed who claimed to have had direct contact with staff of a government institution to carry out some administrative procedure, 7.3% responded that they asked them directly or indirectly for an incentive, such as a gift or extra money to facilitate the procedure or service. By sex, 7.7% of men said they asked them for some incentive, while 6.9% of women experienced this situation. By geographical domains, 7.8% of the people surveyed reported it in the capitals and populated centers and 5.6% in the dispersed rural area.

The Transparency Citizen Corruption Monitor for Colombia carried out a task of identifying, systematizing and analyzing the acts of corruption reported in 25 media outlets during the period 2016-2020. The exercise yielded a total of 967 concrete acts of corruption, reported in 2,026 press releases.

Administrative corruption occurred in 44% of cases. Most of these cases have to do with public procurement processes, associated with practices such as irregular contract routing and payment for undelivered services.

It is followed by the provision of security services, which includes actions such as the sale of confidential information and weapons by members of the military and police forces. And thirdly, corruption in procedures, such as favoring building permits, issuing false certificates, tax evasion, and irregularities in environmental licenses or wildlife transport.

Political corruption is identified in 27% of reports. Cases associated with this type of corruption include the diversion of resources aimed at safeguarding the lives and integrity of people, the use of public resources for the financing of political campaigns, among others. Private corruption is reported in 19% of events, and judicial corruption accounts for 10%. Cases associated with each type of corruption can be found in the full report.

When analyzing the sectors in which corruption occurs, it is identified that 62% of the events are concentrated in six sectors: 21% in the defense sector; 11% in the judicial sector; and 30% of cases in the sectors of education, science and technology; housing, territorial planning and public services; health; and transport .

When analyzing the incidence of corruption in specific population groups, 311 events have been directly affected. In most of them, children and adolescents are directly affected, followed by students and the population in conditions of socio-economic vulnerability. Thus, corruption accentuates the inequalities that already exist in these vulnerable groups.

Within the reported events, only in 367 it was possible to determine a precise figure of the money at stake, on the basis of which it was determined that the money committed by corruption was $92.77 billion pesos, the lost $13.67 billion pesos and the recovered $4.94 billion pesos.

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