Read the attached article. Answer the question below. 1. What is main point being made here? 2. Do you agree? Explain your answer 3. Why do you think it will help reduce corruption if Government deals are made public? 

ARTICLE

Foreign Policy: The Miracle Cure For Corruption

Contracts with private firms are not the only place that corruption can be found in government. Some say the key to fixing the problem is more transparency.iStockphoto.com hide caption

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Contracts with private firms are not the only place that corruption can be found in government. Some say the key to fixing the problem is more transparency.

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Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, and author, most recently, ofGetting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More.

On Dec. 7, Nigerian authorities filed charges against former officials of Halliburton including one Richard Cheney for their involvement in a 10year, $182 million cashforcontracts scandal related to the construction of a power plant in southern Nigeria. The charges were ultimately dropped, but only after Halliburton agreed to pay $250 million and that's in addition to the $177 million Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR have already paid to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges surrounding the same deal.

In defense of Halliburton, they're hardly the only contractors playing in legal gray areas you don't even have to move out of the infrastructure sector to find other examples. Enron was widely accused of wrongdoing in connection with the con struction of the Dabhol power plant in India, a project that produced electricity at a cost four times higher than local pro ducers. Meanwhile, Siemens paid $1.6 billion in fines to U.S. and European regulators to settle charges that it used bribes to secure publicworks contracts around the world. Local companies also get in on the act. Surveys of Afghan firms suggest bribes to obtain government contracts are equal to an average of three percent of the total contract value in the Philip pines, that figure is 10 percent. All that weak governance can have a big impact on prices and quality road rehabilitation financed by the World Bank, for instance, costs 50 percent more in countries where the average contract bribe size is above two percent than in less corrupt countries.

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And even relatively clean countries have plenty of problems with contracting. The U.S. government's are legendary every one's heard of the Pentagon's $640 toilet seats and $20 plastic icecube trays. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security ended up paying contractors $2,480 a house to cover damaged roofs with blue tarps a job that should have cost closer to $300 per roof. A congressional report from 2006 summarizing evidence from govern ment auditors and elsewhere suggested that contracts with a total value of $745 billion had "experienced significant over charges, wasteful spending, or mismanagement over the last five years."

Corruption isn't the only explanation for why contracting goes awry. Even relatively clean governments are hardly models of efficiency, and private competition can often deliver better for less. The problem is transparency. When a government contracts out work, the distance between the people delivering the services and the ultimate customer the taxpayer grows. Contractors have little incentive to save the rest of us money, and our ability to make sure they're doing it is too limited. If a contract is failing, it may well remain a secret between one or two bureaucrats and the company concerned. Government audit agencies might uncover a problem if they are alerted or perform a random investigation. But the rest of us can't hold contractors (or the officials who hired them) to account if we don't even know what's meant to be delivered.