Time to Get Off Your Assets

January 12th, 2008

It’s not easy being a member of the Assets Examination Committee. Tasked with rooting out “irregularities”—the codeword for “corruption”—in government contracts and the like, succeeding at their jobs means pissing people off—very important people, in many cases. At the same time, they’re taking criticism from the opposite corner, accused of being corrupt themselves or at least incompetent.

Most recently the AEC, a.k.a. Jaruwan’s Angels, has been taking flack for its lack of progress in several cases, but in particular the purchase of CTX 9000 scanners for Suvarnabhumi Airport. It’s said they’re just sitting on their assets in their plush offices doing nothing, when they should be going after the bad guys who took millions of baht in bribes. The AEC’s excuse is that there are hundreds of documents to examine, all in English. The translation work has been farmed out to the Foreign Ministry, but the staff there are busy, as well. (Apparently they haven’t even finished sending out the 2008 calendars.)

Blaming the state translators is a lame excuse, but that doesn’t mean the AEC’s very existence should be called into question. We don’t know if the pursuit of lofty and ambiguous goals such as “transparency” is more pressing than dealing with those dirty hands that are floating around the city terrorizing people. Or the feelings of hopelessness brought on by Britney losing custody of her children. But getting rich by compromising the quality of, say, fire trucks that are meant to help save lives is wrong, and somebody should pay. And we’re tired of crap film festivals.

It seems the AEC and Foreign Ministry translators could save themselves some time by skimming the documents first and then prioritizing. For example, an obvious strategy would be to choose the pages with numbers on them, especially numbers with lots of zeroes and those that are divided into groups of three or four, like bank account numbers. Then there are some key words and terms to look for: “commission,” “service charge,” “finder’s fee,” “consultancy fee,” “postage,” “samples” and, our favorite, “handling.”

Good luck with your hunting.