Chapter 3: Petty Corruption – Facilitating Payments and Grease Money

Facilitation payments (petty corruption) are small payments to an officer or employee, public or private, who is responsible for a nondiscretionary service, in order to facilitate, accelerate, or cheapen a procedure, for example, issuing a passport or connecting a house to a power distribution network. They are widespread in some countries, and are often considered irrelevant, but they have very large negative impacts in generating a culture of corruption, affecting the functioning of public offices or private companies and on costs for citizens. This chapter explains what facilitation payments are, why they are an ethical problem for people who pay and receive them, for companies and for society, and the positioning of the fight against those payments within the overall strategy against corruption.