Foreign Policy featured a column by senior fellow Charles Kenny titled, "Publish or Perish" on the need for more transparency with contracting agencies and development work.
From the Article:
On Dec. 7, Nigerian authorities filed charges against former officials of Halliburton -- including one Richard Cheney -- for their involvement in a 10-year, $182 million cash-for-contracts scandal related to the construction of a power plant in southern Nigeria. The charges were ultimately dropped, but only after Halliburton agreed to pay $250 million -- and that's in addition to the $177 million Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR have already paid to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges surrounding the same deal.
In defense of Halliburton, they're hardly the only contractors playing in legal gray areas -- you don't even have to move out of the infrastructure sector to find other examples. Enron was widely accused of wrongdoing in connection with the construction of the Dabhol power plant in India, a project that produced electricity at a cost four times higher than local producers. Meanwhile, Siemens paid $1.6 billion in fines to U.S. and European regulators to settle charges that it used bribes to secure public-works contracts around the world. Local companies also get in on the act. Surveys of Afghan firms suggest bribes to obtain government contracts are equal to an average of 3 percent of the total contract value -- in the Philippines, that figure is 10 percent. All that weak governance can have a big impact on prices and quality -- road rehabilitation financed by the World Bank, for instance, costs 50 percent more in countries where the average contract bribe size is above 2 percent than in less corrupt countries...