Excerpts from an Editorial in Dallas Morning News: Texas court ruling lets government keep contracts secret, inviting corruption to fester (Aug 10, 2016)
A linchpin to government accountability lies in the old admonition to "follow the money." But that's an impossible task when the law says the government -- and companies doing business with government -- can legally hide the trail.
The fallout from a June 2015 ruling by the Texas Supreme Court is becoming painfully clear as key details of government contracts, once routine items of public disclosure, are instead being withheld as guarded state secrets. (To be clear: This is not a matter of protecting business trade secrets from unfair exposure. Provisions for protecting proprietary information existed in the Texas Public Information Act prior to the Boeing decision.)
A random sampling: Costs of a Kaufman County school district's food service contract. The number of Uber drivers ferrying passengers around Houston. And, amusingly, in an anxiety-inducing sort of way, the amount the city of McAllen paid singer Enrique Iglesias for an hour-long outdoor concert to lead off its annual holiday parade last December.
All result from from a 7-1 opinion by the state's highest court, made over the objections of Attorney General Ken Paxton's office. The decision expanded the acceptable reasons for withholding information about contracts between government and private businesses.
Public accountability matters, and transparency is where accountability starts.
The withheld, non-public information in this case was certain financial terms of a 20 year lease of government property to Boeing. The Texas Public Information Act contains an exception to disclosure which applies to information "that, if released, would give advantage to a competitor or bidder.”
The Texas Attorney General had long held that this exception applies only to procurement information, and is meant to protect government interests, not private ones. The Texas Supreme Court rejected both ideas, based on the unqualified simple language of the particular code section. It also rejected the Attorney General's assertion that someone objecting to disclosure must prove substantial advantage to a competitor; the Court said "substantial" was asking too much. The Court accepted Boeing's employee's assertion that competitors would obtain an advantage by using that information to allow them to obtain better lease terms at another location, and, overruling the Attorney General's determination and the findings of the trial court, made the factual determination that disclosure of the information "would give advantage to a competitor" of Boeing.
The Court seemed particularly persuaded that
The information, which the court of appeals ordered disclosed, could not be disclosed by the Air Force under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The D.C. Circuit has rejected three such requests in the last sixteen years. See Canadian Commercial Corp. v. Dep’t of the Air Force, 514 F.3d 37, 38 (D.C. Cir. 2008) ... While disclosing bids after a contract award may rarely give competitors any advantage, the federal cases indicate that the aerospace industry is different because the disclosure of current contract prices gives competitors a distinct advantage by telling them precisely how to undercut the current contractor when contracts are re-bid. Canadian Commercial Corp., 514 F.3d at 42.
Thus, the Court comes awfully close to saying, without actually saying it, that a lease of aerospace industry lands, as a matter of law, contains information which give competitors an advantage. Perhaps, not a significant advantage, but a distinct one.
The Canadian Commercial Corp case is good authority for the Court's holding, at least in part. That case held that "line item pricing" in a government contract is commercial confidential information that fits within the exception to disclosure requirements of federal FOIA and Trade Secrets law. But, the case also said there was a requirement of a showing of substantial competitive disadvantage.
"Commercial or financial information obtained from a person involuntarily "is `confidential' for purposes of the exemption if disclosure [would either] ... impair the Government's ability to obtain necessary information in the future; or... cause substantial harm to the competitive position of the person from whom the information was obtained.""
But there is another issue, and one which is not addressed by the Canadian Commercial case, but was pointed out in its concurring opinion. If essential terms of a contract need not be disclosed because of the "specter of competition" (see this case, following Canadian Commercial), then the exception would swallow the generally recognized rule that government contracts are essentially elements of a procurement record, and public information.
TATEL, Circuit Judge, concurring (citations, etc. omitted):
I agree with my colleagues that under our reverse-FOIA case law, the Exemption 4 test applies to line-item government contract prices like the ones at issue here. Because the Air Force has merely renewed arguments we have already rejected, I join the court's decision.
That said, I believe Judge Garland had it right in his McDonnell Douglas v. Air Force dissent. Not only did he persuasively critique how the court there applied the
National Parks competitive harm test to facts closely resembling the record here, but he also rightly questioned "whether it makes sense to regard prices actually paid by the government as trade secrets `of any person' under the Trade Secrets Act or as confidential commercial or financial information `obtained from a person' under Exemption Four of FOIA." After all, given that FOIA's primary purpose is to inform citizens about "what their government is up to, it seems quite unlikely that Congress intended to prevent the public from learning how much the government pays for goods and services. Moreover, the Air Force, as its position in this case well demonstrates, would prefer to disclose contract line-item and option prices because in a competitive bidding environment such information may well save money for the government and the taxpayers who fund it. By contrast, entities whose interests lie in charging government agencies as much as possible, or in preventing others from charging less for the same services, would prefer to keep such data confidential.
Thus, applying the National Parks competitive harm test to agreed-upon prices in government contracts "may bar disclosure of such prices in the very situation in which the public interest in disclosure is at its apogee." Like Judge Garland, I find that result troubling and inconsistent with FOIA's fundamental objective. But believing the question settled in this circuit, I am compelled to join the court's conclusion that the Air Force must keep the requested pricing information free from public scrutiny.
And there's one more objection I have, if, as Canadian Commercial asserts, for information to be considered confidential, it must be involuntarily disclosed. No one holds a gun to a bidder's head making him or her compete for government business. Choosing to take part in bidding is a voluntary act.
I note that the regulations adopted on Guam, based on the ABA Model Procurement Code, specifically say that prices, in an IFB, are not to be withheld from public inspection.
Procurement award challenges – the disclosure dilemma, by the UK law firm
Mayer Brown LLP
Disputes about public procurement contract awards can pose evidentiary problems for both tenderers and contracting authorities. Does the tenderer challenging an award have enough evidence to support its concern that something has gone wrong? If it does not, will its request for more information be rejected as a ‘fishing expedition’?
Does the contracting authority, in turn, stick to the minimum information that it has to give, or, subject to protecting its confidentiality, does it, despite the time and costs involved, try to be helpful and provide more information, at the risk of opening the door to additional requests?
Bristol City Council’s award of a new contract was challenged by the unsuccessful incumbent contractor ["BMLL"] and the new contract award was automatically suspended. The council asked the court to lift the automatic stay. In deciding that there was a serious issue to be tried and rejecting the council’s interlocutory application, the court recognised the council’s dilemma but said that it should not refuse requests for documents relating, say, to the evaluation of the successful tenderer’s bid, or the bid itself, but then, on the application to lift the suspension, provide, for the first time, evidence about the process or the successful bid in support of its case.
The decision had a number of things to say:
Disclosure in procurement disputes is a perennial problem. On the one hand, an unsuccessful tenderer, whose knowledge of the proposed contract will often be detailed (particularly if, as here, he is the incumbent contractor), may feel instinctively that something has gone wrong in the tender evaluation process. But it can be difficult for him to obtain any information to back up that concern, beyond the sometimes scanty material supplied by the contracting authority ("the authority") pursuant to the Regulations. Any application for early disclosure may often be dismissed as a 'fishing' exercise. There is a real risk that, in such circumstances, there is an unlevel playing field, and the unsuccessful tenderer may never obtain the information he requires to mount a claim.
On the other hand, I quite see that the authority may wish to stand on his rights and refuse all requests for early disclosure, in part because of the confidential nature of the information (although that can usually be dealt with by way of a confidentiality ring), in part because of the time-consuming and expensive business of dealing with such requests, and in part because the authority may feel – often with good cause – that the unsuccessful tenderer will never be satisfied with the answers provided, and will always be seeking just one more document.
It is a question of balancing the interests of justice against the background facts of the particular case.
Contracting authorities have to work out, in fairly short order, whether, having provided the unsuccessful tenderer with the statutory minimum information, they are going to retain all other documents relating to the evaluation and the successful tenderer's bid, and let the unsuccessful tenderer take his own course; or whether they are prepared to be helpful and, providing that the confidentiality of the information is protected, offer to provide as much information about the process as they can.
In my view, however, what the authority should not do is to try and have it both ways. It ought not to refuse requests to provide documents relating, say, to the evaluation of the successful tenderer's bid, or the bid itself, but then, on the application to lift the suspension, provide for the first time evidence about the process or the successful bid in support of its case, either that there is no serious issue to be tried, or that he would be prejudiced if the suspension was not lifted. That approach is at least potentially unfair, because it is relying on potentially controversial material which the unsuccessful tenderer has been given no proper opportunity to consider.
I ... conclude that controversial material, and/or material which, because of the absence of prior disclosure, the claimant is simply not in a position to address satisfactorily if it is produced for an interlocutory hearing, should not ordinarily be deployed on an application [to lift the "suspension"/stay], because of the risk of unfairness. I consider that, in this case, the Council has sought a potentially unfair advantage through its attitude to disclosure. There are two reasons for that.
First, their solicitor Ms Nugent purports to give evidence as to how the [preferred] Refuge tender was evaluated (even though she was not involved in this process). She does this by reference to documents which were sought by BMLL but the disclosure of which was refused.
As it happens, BMLL were able to download from the Council's website a document which appeared to be the Council's evaluation of the Refuge bid. The Council have complained that this document has been wrongly obtained by BMLL, but I find the evidence on that unpersuasive. It is much more likely that this document was wrongly downloaded by a Council employee to this particular part of the website, so that it could then be accessed by others, including BMLL. A Council's inability to use its own website facilities properly is hardly unusual.
But now, in order to argue that BMLL do not raise a serious issue, the Council have disclosed a detailed scoring sheet for Refuge that is in a different and fuller form to the one BMLL downloaded from their website in January. As Ms Metters of BMLL says...:
"No explanation was provided as to why it was suddenly felt appropriate to disclose that document where previously it had been withheld. This document has caused us further concern about unequal treatment because it shows that many points of criticism about Refuge's bid were taken out of the feedback that was apparently given to them with their standstill letter, potentially to justify the high scores that were awarded."
I regard it as potentially unfair for the Council to pick and choose what documents they provide and when, as it suits them.
Worse still in my view is the copious evidence in the witness statements of Mr Anderson (a Service manager with the Council) and Ms Nugent, which seeks to extol the virtues of the Refuge tender itself. This is done in order to persuade the court that there would be prejudice to the Council and the service users if the suspension was not lifted and the contract with Refuge was delayed. But it is difficult for BMLL to respond in any detail to such material, when it was not provided when they asked for it. Moreover that problem is compounded here because the evidence consists of a series of assertions based on what it is said is in the Refuge tender, as opposed to the specifics of the tender itself (which has still not been disclosed).
Often, in a suspension/injunction dispute in a procurement case, the contracting authority will accept that there was a serious issue to be tried. But in the ordinary procurement case, where there may be points to be made on both sides, it will often be unproductive for the parties (and a waste of judicial resources) to spend a good deal of time arguing about the merits or otherwise of the underlying claim. The threshold is, after all, a low one: [***] first that, in cases where there are clear issues arising out of individual scores, it will be difficult for the court to conclude that there is no serious issue to be tried; and, second, that this difficulty arises, at least in part, because the relevant documents have yet to be disclosed.
The Court then evaluated the claim to lift the stay/suspension by weighing the relative damages each party might suffer if the stay were sustained or lifted, considering factors described as "the balance of convenience".
Central to the result was this important element:
"there is a public interest in the avoidance of delay and ... there will be a detriment to that interest if it is necessary to wait a further six weeks .... I do not, however, consider that detriment to be sufficient to outweigh the strong public interest in compliance with the law and the benefits that implementing the scheme in a lawful way may be expected to bring."
There is Guam Supreme Court judicial authority and Public Auditor administrative review authority for the proposition that parties cannot be charged with knowledge of facts unknown to them when they have been withheld by the government. See, Guam Imaging Consultants, Inc. v. GMHA 2004 Guam 15, ¶ 36 (coincidentally also a procurement case involving issues related to the stay and its lifting), and In the Appeal of Town House Dept. Stores (etc.) OPA-PA-08-011.
Guam procurement law also specifically states that procurement records are public information, generally, 5 GCA § 5251 (e.g., 2 GAR § 3114(h) re nondisclosure of proposals/tenders, which in any event would not include the evaluation records). Further, 5 GCA § 5485 provides an expedited judicial action that may be brought by "any member of the public" to obtain withheld "procurement data". The time limit for bringing a judicial review of an administrative protest decision is specifically "tolled" so long as the disclosure action is pending (5 GCA § 5481(a)).
I have previously mentioned the debated issue whether procurement transparency laws follow on to the contracts let for government work. See Will FOIA be foiled by outsourced subcontracting?
The article cited below (click link)arises in Minnesota where its Supreme Court ruled, in the factual context of that case, that private contractors are immune from the State's equivalent FOIA law by a contract clause excluding them from the coverage of the law.
Minnesota high court: Business not subject to open-records laws
The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a private business that contracted with a northern school district to renovate buildings isn’t subject to state open-records laws. The high court reversed the Appeals Court’s October ruling, which had been viewed as a victory for public access to government contracts.
Under the law, private residents or businesses contracting with the government must comply with the state’s Data Practices Act “as if it were a government entity.” A notice of the requirement must be included in the contract. In this case, the notice was excluded. Without it, the Supreme Court concluded there wasn’t a provision in the Data Practices Act that made the contract between Johnson Controls and the architectural firm public.
In 2011, the state Department of Administration sided with Helmberger, but an administrative law judge threw out the request because the subcontract “did not involve the performance of a government function.” The Appeals Court disagreed, arguing that the planning of five public schools falls under state laws that mandate the duty of a school district to “furnish school facilities” to children, including constructing and renovating buildings.
The state Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t address the question of whether Johnson was performing a government function. In a concurring opinion, Justice Alan Page wrote that he didn’t agree with the court’s “blanket conclusion” that data held by an individual, corporation or association performing a government function are nonpublic. It should depend on whether the contract calls for the contractor to perform a government function.
“If the court had ruled on the question of government function, it may have gotten into Alice-in-Wonderland complexities that would have been extremely difficult to resolve from case to case,” said Anfinson.
Todd Wind, who represented Johnson, said the Supreme Court struck the right balance for the business community and citizens of Minnesota. The ruling recognizes the Data Practices Act doesn’t make all information public just because somebody does business with a government entity, he said. “The ruling makes the requirement of the notice abundantly clear,” he said. “But we believed Johnson wasn’t performing a government function anyway.”
It seems fairly well settled, on Guam, that a procurement contract executed with the government of Guam is a public record that must be disclosed to the extent it is not protected by provisions regarding proprietary information or trade secrets.
But notice that this case did not involve a question of a government contract, rather, a subcontract between the government contractor and a subcontractor. That becomes a more iffy question, but would probably be covered by a governmental function rule -- if there is a governmental function criteria applied to FOIA coverage.
Since government is now engaging in larger and more complex acquisitions than in times past, times need to keep up and legislate to include -- or exclude if that is the preferred policy -- subcontracts of government contracts within the scope of public record transparency requirements, subject, of course, to matters determined by the government to be proprietary information or trade secrets. Issues like the contract definitions and descriptions of the scope of work, as appeared to be at issue in this case, would hardly ever be considered proprietary information or trade secrets.
Zoltan Kovacs of firm SZECSKAY - Attorneys at Law reports, on the Mondaq website, on some changes in the rules governing Hungarian public procurement procedures. One such change involves greater disclosure of bids.
Hungary: Changes In Hungarian Public Procurement Law
During public procurement procedures, participants/bidders were in the habit of declaring that – except for the information sheet containing their basic data – their entire submission qualified as a business secret and that, as such, they expected the entity calling for bids to treat the entire submission as a business secret which was not open for review for other participants/bidders. In practice, this oftentimes made it impossible for the other participants/bidders to seek remedy (since they could not even review the submission of their competitors and, therefore, could not tell if the submission made was in compliance with the applicable laws and tender requirements).
Even though, in our view, the practice described above was definitely not in line with the provisions of the Public Procurement Act and of the Civil Code governing business secrets, unfortunately the entities calling for bids and even the Public Procurement Board (which is the authority in charge of making administrative decisions based on requests for remedy filed with it) accepted and agreed to this practice and did not challenge it in any way.
The law-maker recognized the above discrepancy concerning business secrets and adopted a change in the provisions of the Public Procurement Act. Under the new rules, also with regard to the definition of business secrets under the Civil Code, only that information, the publication of which would cause a considerable harm to the participant's/bidder's business, may qualify as business secrets. Taking the new rule into account, it is expected that the entities calling for bids and the Public Procurement Board will no longer follow their previous practice and that, as a consequence, participants/bidders will be able to review the bids of their competitors to the extent that they do not qualify as a business secret. As a result, participants/bidders will hopefully be put in a position to seek remedy if, based on the findings of their review of a bid, they detect a violation of the public procurement rules and/or the tender requirements.
Guam procurement regulations, based on the ABA Model Regulations, requires a bit more transparency for bids. 2 GAR § 3109(l) spells them out.
Subsection 3109(l)(2) requires that,
The opened bids shall be available for public inspection except to the extent the bidder designates trade secrets or other proprietary data to be confidential as set forth in Subsection 3109(l)(3) of this section. Material so designated shall accompany the bid and shall be readily separable from the bid in order to facilitate public inspection of the nonconfidential portion of the bid. Prices and makes and models or catalogue numbers of the items offered, deliveries, and terms of payment shall be publicly available at the time of bid opening regardless of any designation to the contrary.
Subsection 3109(l)(3) puts the onus on the government to affirmatively examine claimed confidential information to verify it qualifies as a trade secret or proprietary data.
The Procurement Officer shall examine the bids to determine the validity of any requests for nondisclosure of trade secrets and other proprietary data identified in writing. If the parties do not agree as to the disclosure of data, the Procurement Officer shall inform the bidders in writing. If the parties do not agree as to the disclosure of data, the Procurement Officer shall inform the bidders in writing what portions of the bids will be disclosed and that, unless the bidder protests under Chapter 9 (Legal and Contractual Remedies of this Guam Procurement Regulations, the bids will be so disclosed. The bids shall be opened to public inspections subject to any continuing prohibition on the confidential data.
One large international corporation doing a substantial amount of government contract work on Guam has had the habit in recent times of declaring practically its whole bid to be confidential, including contract terms it tries to unilaterally impose as part of its bid. I have had two occasions to protest that circumstance, at the appeal level, because the government agency has bent unquestionably to the designation. Fortunately, the administrative review tribunal has not been so reluctant, in contrast to the circumstances in Hungary as reported in the article above, that " unfortunately the entities calling for bids and even the Public Procurement Board (which is the authority in charge of making administrative decisions based on requests for remedy filed with it) accepted and agreed to this practice and did not challenge it in any way."
After reading the article below, I was reminded of a litmus test for doing something that you feel, or should feel, perhaps you ought not do: How would you like it if your action was front page news tomorrow?Sky's the limit for political gifts (Australia)
The Herald today publishes an Australian first, a database that captures federal politicians' disclosures over the past two years, revealing the free trips and gifts they receive from powerful vested interests. The information is not released publicly except in the form of unsearchable handwritten documents.
The Israel lobby, Qantas and mining companies are leading the charge in lavishing federal politicians with all-expenses paid junkets and other gifts, a Herald investigation has found. Billionaires including Gina Rinehart, big drug companies, controversial Chinese technology company Huawei and multinational defence contractors are behind many of the "free" flights and high-level entertainment handed to politicians.
Richard Mulgan, an emeritus professor at the Australian National University who has written extensively on accountability, said there should be a "brick wall" to gifts and hospitality from major defence contractors given the large sums of money at stake.
More generally, he questioned whether politicians accepting gifts from companies had fully considered why companies were paying to take them on trips."Obviously people can accept gifts and so on but if there's any suggestion that it can influence a particular decision it's not a good look," he said.
"You would have to ask yourself: why would the company do it? If the company's motives are less than pure you have to ask yourself whether you're contaminating yourself."
Professor John Uhr, the director of the centre for the study of Australian politics at the Australian National University, said there was little policing of politicians' behaviour in accepting gifts and trips. "You really need to lay down certain standards you can honestly expect your representatives to have," he says. "At the moment there is just nothing."
Professor Mulgan said the current handwritten disclosures by politicians compromised transparency as a method of holding politicians accountable. "Transparency means that the public can readily get hold of that information," he says.
Read more at the article link.
D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray Proposes End to Pay-to-Play Politics Today, Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray is proposing a set of campaign finance and ethics reforms specifically targeting pay-to-play corruption, the all-too-common practice of a business entity making campaign contributions to candidates and public officials with the hope of gaining a lucrative government contract.
Washington, D.C., is embroiled in a series of government contracting scandals that have caused immense harm to the image and credibility of the District government. It is important that District officials make reasonable efforts to assure the public and the business community that campaign contributions are not the gateway to District contracts.
If adopted, the mayor’s pay-to-play reforms would be among the strongest in the nation. Government contractors would be prohibited from making campaign contributions to, or expenditures on behalf of, any District candidate or official who is or could be involved in awarding the contract. Similarly, they cannot give to or spend on behalf of any political committee associated with an individual or nonprofit group controlled by the candidate or official. “Government contractor” is broadly defined to include all senior executives of the company seeking a contract. Even the spouses and dependent children of the executives would be limited to contributions of no more than $300 per election.
By taking the simple step of divorcing campaign contributions from government contracts, this critical pay-to-play reform proposal will help rebuild public confidence in the integrity of the District’s government contracting process. The measures will also provide useful guidance for public officials on how to avoid the political minefield of the appearance of corruption, whether justified or not, that accompanies pay-to-play practices.
Rules on consultants not followed Hiring consultants without competition, getting uncontested project extensions and lobbying government have likely been systemic issues at all Ontario hospitals, says provincial auditor general Jim McCarter.
Among McCarter’s more shocking findings was the extent of single-sourced contracts — 75 per cent — and follow-on contracts that saw consultants work related jobs without having to reapply.
In one example, a consultant hired for a $160,000 job ended up being paid more than $1 million in add-on jobs.
Raising The Bar For Accountability And Transparency Ontario is proposing strict new rules that would prevent organizations funded with taxpayer dollars from using public funds to hire external lobbyists to ask for more funding.
The proposed Broader Public Sector Accountability Act would, if passed, bring in new rules and higher accountability standards for hospitals, Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) and the broader public sector around the use of external lobbyists, consultants and expenses. Hospital and LHIN executives could see reductions in pay, should they fail to comply with the requirements under the proposed Act.
The new rules would also apply to school boards, colleges, universities, hydro entities, community care access centres, Children's Aid Societies and other public sector organizations that receive more than $10 million in government funding.
In addition to ending the use of taxpayer dollars to hire lobbyists, the new rules would:
* Expand Freedom of Information legislation to cover hospitals.
* Require hospitals and LHINs to post expenses of senior executives online.
* Require hospitals and LHINs to report annually on their use of consultants.
The government is implementing the recommendations of the Auditor General and is taking further initiatives to raise the bar for accountability and transparency, whenever taxpayer dollars are spent. Increasing transparency and accountability is a key component of the government's Open Ontario Plan.
EDIT NOTE Feb 9, 2011: Having recently critically reviewed a Guam procurement administrative review decision on disclosure of minority ownership interests "as a condition of bidding" in my draft of the next version 2.1 of the Guam Procurement Process Primer (see Sneak Preview link in side bar), I want to correct the headline to this post. As the article noted below, the conflicts disclosure is not actually a condition precedent to bidding as the headline might suggest, but a condition, subsequent to bidding, of award, and a continuing obligation of performance, to voluntarily disclose conflicts (though it is hard to reconcile what is meant by the "mandate" to "voluntarily" disclose).Pentagon seeks to force contract bidders to disclose conflicts of interest Defense Department contractors would be required to disclose any possible organizational conflicts of interest before bidding on projects, under a proposed rule published on Thursday in the Federal Register.
"The government must avoid the appearance of impropriety, which taints the public view of the acquisition system," the notice stated. "Organizational conflicts of interest, by their mere appearance, call into question the integrity and fairness of the competitive procurement process. This concern exists regardless of whether any individual contractor employee or contractor organization ever actually renders biased advice or benefits from an unfair competitive advantage."
Organizational conflicts of interest occur when a firm has access to nonpublic information that would give it a leg up in competing for work, the rule said. Conflicts also could crop up when a contractor is performing tasks that are subjective and that could have an impact on its bottom line. These situations would include a company helping to prepare a statement of work and then bidding on that project.
The rule would mandate that bidders voluntarily disclose facts that could relate to an organizational conflict of interest both prior to the award and on a continuing basis during performance of the contract.
As with all other posts, you are encouraged to read the entire linked article.
For further general reading on the subject of conflicts of interest, see ADDRESSING CONFLICTS OF INTEREST IN PROCUREMENT: FIRST STEPS ON THE WORLD STAGE, FOLLOWING THE UN CONVENTION AGAINST CORRUPTION.
