Corruption in Vietnam is serious, blatant, and omnipresent, admitted Le Van Lan, deputy office chief of the Central Steering Committee for Anti-Corruption during a conference in July held by the National Assembly’s Standing Committee.

Lan categorized corruption into 6 sectors: in the management of land and natural resources (take bribes to grant title deeds); in the finance banking sector; in construction (inflate building costs); in management of state assets (embezzlement, faking invoices); in human resource management (bribery for jobs, promotion); and in judicial sector (judges take bribes to alter verdicts).

The Party and State has asserted that “the corruption situation in Vietnam is serious”, he admitted.

Lan also mentioned data from Transparency International in his report which could be found in Vietnamese on oscac.gov.vn, the official anti-corruption website launched by the government in May this year.

According to Transparency International, Vietnam’s level of corruption is among the highest in the world.

Lan said that in 2007, Vietnam scored 2.6 points on the Transparency International index, ranking 123 out of 179 countries and territories; in 2008, it scored 2.7, ranking 121/180; in 2009 2.7 points, ranking 120/180; in 2010 2.7 points, ranked 116/178.

Last year, Vietnam ranked 112th out of 182 countries and territories, scoring 2.9 points.

That means in recent years, the Southeast Asian country scored below 3 points on the corruption index and nations scoring below 3 have “serious” corruption according to Transparency International, Lan told the conference.

Compared to Asia, Vietnam’s corruption is more serious than Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Brunei, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Indonesia… but less serious than Mongolia, Philippines, Laos, Nepal, Cambodia, Myanmar…

“In summary, corruption in Vietnam is serious, sophisticated, complicated, and blatant occurring across many sectors, and at many levels”, Lan said.

In the past, corruption occurred mainly in the economic sector but now has spread to education, healthcare, charity, social policy, humanitarian, anti-epidemic activities, even in law protection agencies like police, prosecutor’s office, court…

Small bribes are rampant, especially for low-ranking officials like police officers, tax employees, doctors, nurses while in other countries corruption mainly occur among senior politicians.