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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

This change (making bribes legal for the payer, just not the payee) seems highly sensible. Right now, if an official demands a bribe for something you have a right to in the first place, you can attempt to report them, but meanwhile you have to do without, with the associated cost to you. With this change, you can still report the person demanding the bribe, but in the meantime you can choose whether it would cost you less to go ahead and pay the bribe (and hope to get it back later) than to do without whatever you'd needed in the first place.

This won't help in all cases, though: as I understand it, some countries (including the US) have laws against paying bribes in other countries, even when such a prohibition effectively prevents doing business in those countries.

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Except bribes undermine social fairness significantly. Notice that as the clerk presumably knows how much money he should give you for your tax returns there is a strong incentive for him to ask for a bribe that covers a significant share of your tax returns, effectively making the entire tax return process useless for the citizen.

Also, if you think of a slightly different scenario, imagine the office is only allowed to issue X tax returns a month (maybe the money comes in packets), and the bribe is required to cut the line. Now it's really unfair and wrong, and a lot more so for the briber than for the bribee.

You should have in mind that it's not actually that hard to bribe people indirectly. Any place with a bribing culture tends to have people you can hire to unofficially bribe some government employee to do something for you. In Brazil these are called "despachantes" (dispatchers), and even though in the last decade or so they have been getting progressively more useless as the country moves away from a bribing culture, you should keep in mind that a lot of despachantes are legally incorporated and even pay taxes. One can't be blamed for hiring that sort of person.

In Brazil...in the last decade or so they have been getting progressively more useless as the country moves away from a bribing culture...

Just curious, could you elaborate on how and why this has occurred? (Moving away from a bribing culture, I mean.)

Also, do you think other countries could do the same thing?

I think it came with the economic boom, but I'm at a loss at explaining how or why. Also, part of my perception can be because I moved from a less to a more "civilized" place in Brazil (from Salvador to São Paulo).

I have anecdotal reports, from members of my family who used to work in law, that a couple of decades ago buying and selling real estate, for example, required a lot of palm-greasing. Maybe due to pressures from the industry this is not true right now in the big cities (I rarely go to the countryside, so I don't know how things are over there, although in brazil the coutnryside tends to move more slowly).

It seems, however, that even at its peak Brazil never had as bad a bribing culture as India seems to have, from the news.

All of the bribing I hear about these days are teenagers and young adults bribing cops to overlook possession of small amounts of drugs (and also some very high profile cases in the government), but bribing to get things you should have by right is something I or anyone I know in my generation has never had to do.

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