via Khmer NZ
Aug 24, 2010
Phnom Penh - Staff at Cambodia's newly-formed anti-corruption unit will have to take an annual lie detector test to ensure their integrity, national media reported Tuesday.
Om Yentieng, the unit's chairman, told a workshop in Phnom Penh the polygraph test was one of a range of measures that would be used to ensure officials remained squeaky clean.
'All investigation officials will be supervised by a small unit that will monitor them to make sure they are not corrupted,' Om Yentieng said, according to the Cambodia Daily newspaper.
'The polygraph machine will question whether they are lying or not,' he said, adding that staff would also need to disclose with whom they ate lunch and dinner.
'We have a small, secret unit to monitor them and they must declare their conflicts of interest,' Om Yentieng said. 'They cannot go anywhere eating with anyone without our authorization.'
However, veteran opposition parliamentarian Son Chhay, a regular critic of the government and corruption, dismissed the measures.
He said the authorities would be better off outlining the steps they would take to tackle graft, and could start with telling the public how the unit recruits its staff.
'There is no transparency. You have to be clear with the public about how you recruit staff and what their backgrounds and qualifications are before we can move to the next stage of making them committed to doing their job properly,' he said.
Son Chhay added that the government ought to invest more effort in removing thousands of 'ghost' employees in the civil service.
Earlier this year the government admitted to at least 2,000 fake employees on the government payroll after an audit of 20 per cent of the bureaucracy.
Cambodia is ranked as one of the world's most corrupt countries by global corruption monitor Transparency International, which organised Monday's workshop.
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