People are more interested in corruption investigation rather than prevention activities, probably due to the strong social attitude that it is more important to punish corrupt authorities directly. However, prevention of corruption is much more important than investigating committed crimes.
Various regulations are adopted by relevant government authorities and are domestically followed. Nevertheless, certain regulations violate the Rule of law and resolve issues that are not specified in the law.
One of the primary functions in corruption prevention is to review these regulations to discover if there is a bureaucracy, unnecessary steps in providing civil service that may cause corruption. Furthermore, proposing to repeal the regulation that may lead to corruption crimes.
To this end, the Corruption prevention officers of Mongolian Independent Authority Against Corruption (IAAC) had reviewed the “Procedure for vehicle registration and issuing license plates” regulation approved by the Minister of Roads and Transportation in 2019. Following the regulation, the vehicle importer shall provide a pre-export technical inspection report of the vehicle exporting country.
Ministry of the Road and Transportation has explained the purpose of the regulation is to prevent the registration of vehicles that are technically incomplete and involved in accidents abroad. Therefore, the officials had signed a contract with a Japanese company to conduct a pre-export inspection of vehicles imported to Mongolia, to provide free use of the registered database after the inspection, and to issue a certificate of completion to each imported vehicle.
In consequence, several Japanese car suppliers, such as “Autocom” charged 20,000 yen (185 USD) per car for technical inspection, thus increasing the sale price of cars imported from Japan, making it impossible to monitor vehicles imported from other countries such as South Korea, Australia, and the USA.
“In general, banning the import of vehicles that are technically incomplete, involved in accidents should be resolved by domestic law, not by the decision of any official,” said Dulamsuren, Head of the Prevention and Public Awareness Department of IAAC.
After reviewing the illegal decision of the official, the Minister of Roads and Transportation was recommended to resolve the issue, therefore, a contract with a Japanese company has been terminated, preventing the financial pressure on the citizens which IAAC had monitored the implementation.
As a result of the corruption prevention activity, vehicle importers and citizens of Mongolia save up to 30.4 billion tugriks ($10.6 million) annually.
