Not much to see here. Crowd sourced, vibe coded app. Not sure what "verified" means because the only verification they did was require a checkbox that "I confirm this is a genuine experience"

• unsnap_biceps

  yesterday at 3:53 AM

  > Others confirm the pattern When reports cluster around one office or officer, the algorithm flags a verified pattern automatically

  It just requires enough others to say the same thing for it to be verified.

  • neverenderr

    yesterday at 6:23 AM

    Fair catch, clustering does get flagged automatically, but that just means "multiple people reported it," not "confirmed true." Same issue: "verified" oversells it either way.

• 4d4m

  yesterday at 9:23 PM

  Do you genuinely think unaffected parties are poisoning the well here? Most likely those asked to pay are reporting.

• neverenderr

  yesterday at 6:19 AM

  Fair on "verified" - it's really "manually reviewed" (duplicate/outlier checks), not independently verified. Should probably fix that word on the site.

  • yesterday at 6:36 AM

• superfrank

  yesterday at 5:37 AM

  > Not sure what "verified" means

  If you want your post verified, that'll cost you $100

  • neverenderr

    yesterday at 6:21 AM

    Ha, fair dig. For the record, it's optional and has nothing to do with what gets published, but I get why the timing makes it look that way.

If I were a corrupt official in one of the departments I would simply use a vpn and submit a bunch of data for my specific specialty all across the country and then slightly fewer in my own department to drive demand and set market expectations

• winstonlee

  yesterday at 4:26 AM

  Counterpoint: if they have that much tech expertise and competency managing things they would have left and make more money doing more productive things :)

  • SlightlyLeftPad

    yesterday at 7:10 AM

    Counter to that, they could bribe someone else to do it for them.

  • neverenderr

    yesterday at 6:25 AM

    Agreed.

• neverenderr

  yesterday at 6:26 AM

  [dead]

• yesterday at 6:25 AM

In India*

• neverenderr

  yesterday at 6:29 AM

  My bad.

Love the concept, please spend sometime with UI, gives a sense that the reported numbers are not serious.

Could providing a leaderboard drive competition in looking for the highest amount of bribes?

• newsomix9xl

  yesterday at 9:03 PM

  You won...an investigation!

• neverenderr

  yesterday at 6:33 AM

  Fair point, hadn't considered that. A leaderboard risks rewarding exaggeration. Would think about this.

Need San Francisco version.

How did you articulate this data? How real is this ?

• neverenderr

  yesterday at 6:28 AM

  [dead]

makes me wonder, why aren't the western government as corrupt?

what's the whole mechanism keeping things functioning?

• orf

  yesterday at 11:19 AM

  Relative poverty and enforcement: if a cop accepts a bribe they can lose their job. It’s not worth accepting £20 (or even £2000) bribe and forfeit larger future earnings.

  So when bribes do happen it’s for much greater amounts (or nebulous, hard-to-trace things like favours), which rules out bribes for minor infractions.

  • 2Gkashmiri

    yesterday at 3:31 PM

    My question is, how do you "prove" this.

    We have cases in India where someone was held to not having been commited a crime 30 years after being first caught taking few bucks.

    They lost their life, earnings, social status and in the end a judge says "you are free to go" but there is no compensation. https://www.news18.com/india/declared-innocent-after-30-year...

    Or this case

    https://indian.community/news/delhi-high-court-upholds-convi...

    But it doesn't mean corruption isn't caught or people don't care. They do, it's just people get away with a lot of things

surprisingly accurate. I've seen the average between median and max being the sweet spot (based on 4 datapoints)

• neverenderr

  yesterday at 6:36 AM

  Ha, small sample but I'll take it. Curious what departments those 4 were from, if you remember.

I'm a lawyer. I deal with government officials on behalf of clients.

I will give a different context of it.

Many people "do actually" commit tax fraud. It's just real.

Then you have people who don't do "compliance" and government officials see this as potential cash cow.

Then you have third category of "clients". These people just are unlucky. The officer "wants" to get a certain sum of money as bribes so they are indiscriminate in who they target. Any fully compliant client "has to" pay to avoid "further complications" and they quietly pay because they don't want hassles.

This website was built by end users who see "oh why do I have to pay a bribe" when most likely they have committed tax fraud and just want to be quiet about it.

Example.

People calling fake deductions in their income tax returns or giving fake donations and claiming deductions. People often say "oh I didn't know" but it'd actually tax fraud so why not face full music of the law if you do it?

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050566

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969051

A lot of people in western countries are unaware of how bad corruption is in the developing world.

It's not uncommon for something like 80% of government officials of all types to be corrupt, compared to under 5-10% in the west.

Go to one of these countries and you'll see it for yourself first hand if you ever deal with the government in any capacity.

You may start to see the same thing in the west with idelologues such as Trump, who care more about loyalty and power than corruption. He has already removed a lot of checks and balances in the system.

• andrewinardeer

  yesterday at 5:37 AM

  What the west calls corruption the east calls tradition.

  • yieldcrv

    yesterday at 6:05 AM

    the west just formalizes the expedited processing fee vis “due process” or a “deferred prosecution agreement”

    • newsomix9xl

      yesterday at 9:05 PM

      Indeed, don't forget book deals, TV specials, speakers fees, offers of deferred employment in the company being regulated, and so on.

[dead]

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• DANmode

  yesterday at 3:59 AM

  I like how I knew this was targeted at (minimum) the Brazilian or Indian market before getting to the footer.