Bribery involves promising money or favors to someone in power to influence their behavior. It is a crime in many regions, but the line between bribery and tipping can be blurry. Bribes can affect the quality of transactions and are common in public officials, finance, medicine, and politics. Drawing the boundary with tangents is challenging, as some payments could be seen as kickbacks. In some countries, bribes are seen as fixed taxes, and acting with integrity may require bribing officials.
Bribery is a form of bribery that involves promising money or a favor to someone in a position of power, with the hope of influencing that person’s behavior. Corruption is considered a crime in many regions of the world, and people who are caught giving or receiving bribes can face heavy fines. In other regions, the line between bribery and tipping is sometimes quite blurry, which can make it difficult to prosecute people for bribery or to tell when you’ve crossed the line.
“Bribe” entered English in the 1300s, meaning something stolen; comes from the French corruptor, “to beg”. Around 1500, the “bribe” began to acquire its current associations with corruption.
There are several reasons why bribery is considered a crime. First, accepting a bribe and acting on it is a clear abuse of power and a dereliction of duty. In egalitarian societies, the thought of anointing the street with bribes is particularly distasteful, because it highlights the differences between those who can buy power or favors and those who cannot. A bribe can also affect the quality of a transaction. For example, when a construction company bribes a government official to get a contract, the government official may overlook a company that provides superior or cheaper work, thus essentially deceiving the government.
Bribes can take any number of forms. Historically, bribes to public officials have been extremely common and continue to be so in some regions. Bribes also play a role in the financial sector and even in occupations such as medicine, where doctors can be bribed by pharmaceutical companies to prescribe their products. Politics is also rife with corruption in many regions, with people bribing politicians to achieve desired ends and politicians in turn offering bribes to others in hopes of achieving specific goals, such as winning an election.
Drawing the boundary with tangents is very challenging. For example, many politicians receive healthy campaign contributions from an assortment of companies and industries. These payments could be seen as kickbacks in the eyes of some critics, especially when politicians vote and act in the interests of their biggest taxpayers. However, it could also be argued that these companies certainly have a right to endorse the candidates they like, especially when those candidates have political beliefs that align with the interests of the company.
Similarly, the practice of bribing government officials in some countries is so widespread that bribes are seen almost as fixed taxes. People who attempt to act with integrity may find that the ministry in question never approves a request or document, thus forcing them to bribe an official to get the job done. In some cases, such kickbacks are even tax-deductible, with tax agencies recognizing them as a legitimate business expense.
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