58.89%
of Bhutanese citizens believe favouritism speeds up service delivery · NIA 2022
The Phone Call That Moves the File
Not corruption in the prosecutable sense. The phone call from a relative that moves the file faster than the queue would. Six in ten Bhutanese say it works.
The headline finding
Six in ten Bhutanese say the phone call works
The Anti-Corruption Commission’s 2022 National Integrity Assessment surveyed citizen perception of public-sector integrity across nine sectors. One of its headline findings:
58.89%
of Bhutanese citizens believe favouritism speeds up service delivery
This is not a finding about bad actors. It is a finding about a country small enough that the formal queue and the informal network occupy the same office building.
Six out of ten Bhutanese — surveyed by the country’s constitutional anti-corruption body, using methodology comparable to Transparency International’s regional assessments — say that calling someone gets the file moved faster than waiting in line would.
The formal infrastructure
What the country has actually built
By formal-architecture measures, Bhutan performs well. The country has built — in just under two decades since the constitutional moment of 2008 — institutional infrastructure that is rare for a country of its size and income.
ACC
Anti-Corruption Commission · constituted 2006 · prosecutes at every tier of the civil service
RAA
Royal Audit Authority · publishes Annual Audit Report each fiscal year · binding parliamentary review
OAG
Office of the Attorney General · independent state prosecution function
NIA
National Integrity Assessment · periodic survey of citizen perception · 9-sector disaggregation
Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index typically places Bhutan in the upper half of Asian countries. The institutions exist, they are funded, they are staffed, they file public reports. The headline metrics on outright bribery are low.
What runs in parallel
The informal accountability layer
What the country has also built — implicitly, by social geography — is a parallel informal accountability layer that the formal system does not capture.
Roughly six in ten Bhutanese, per the NIA, have used a personal connection to obtain a routine government service. This is not necessarily fraud. It includes:
- A phone call to a relative working at the ministry that moves a permit application up the queue
- A village-network introduction that gets a Dzongdag’s office to schedule a meeting sooner
- A school-friend connection that processes a business licence faster than the formal turnaround time
None of these is criminal. None gets prosecuted by the ACC. None shows up in the RAA’s audit observations. They are, taken individually, legitimate routine services that should not require a personal call — but the personal call works, and the queue without the call does not.
The audit-side parallel
One mega-project absorbs the audit apparatus
A parallel finding on the audit side. The RAA’s FY 2024–25 Annual Audit Report recorded total construction-procurement irregularities of Nu 9,987 million — more than double the FY 2021–22 figure of Nu 4,002 million.
78%
of FY 2024–25 audit irregularities concentrated in one project — Punatsangchhu-II Hydropower
The other 22% is spread across hundreds of smaller projects, agencies, and institutions. The visible royal-vision project absorbs disproportionate institutional attention; the second-order audit-and-compliance apparatus has not yet been built at the scale required to monitor multi-decade construction windows.
The Crown’s articulating function continues to operate on a forty-year horizon. The compliance apparatus that should monitor that horizon operates, today, on an annual one. The gap shows up in the audit report.
The media context
One journalist per 5,200 Bhutanese
The third axis of formal accountability — the press — operates at modest scale.
1 in 5,200
journalists per Bhutanese citizens · the country's total full-time investigative-and-news-reporting workforce is in the low triple digits
By regional comparison, India runs at roughly 1 journalist per 1,200 citizens, Bangladesh at 1 in 1,500. The Bhutanese press is institutionally serious (Kuensel, BBS, The Bhutanese, Bhutan Times, Business Bhutan) but small. A handful of senior reporters carry the bulk of independent investigation; institutional turnover is high.
What this means structurally: the formal accountability triangle — ACC + RAA + OAG — has no large complementary press infrastructure cross-validating its findings, surfacing new patterns, or applying sustained pressure on slow-moving cases.
The case in motion
The Bank of Bhutan migration episode
A concrete recent case illustrates the three-axis dynamic in motion. In February 2026, the Bank of Bhutan’s core-banking-system migration produced a Nu 1.5 billion erroneous credit due to a single un-migrated configuration field.
Nu 1.5bn
erroneous credit · 12 February 2026 BoB CBS migration
Nu 228M
penalty imposed on BoB by the RMA
Nu 191M
enforcement file with the OAG
49 days
defendant employee in custody before bail
The case is — as of the time of writing — before the Office of the Attorney General. No charge sheet has yet been filed; nothing here pre-judges the eventual conviction or acquittal. The episode is referenced as evidence of the architecture in motion — RMA detects, OAG prosecutes, the press covers — and the architecture’s limits, where a single un-migrated configuration field at the country’s largest bank could run for 24 hours undetected.
What follows
The slow path to predictability
The work of the next twenty years on the formal-vs-informal-accountability question is not new prosecutions or new audit lines. It is:
Service-delivery SLAs
every routine government service · published turnaround time · public dashboard of compliance
Digital backbone
service delivery rails that eliminate the human-discretion step that the phone call exploits
Press capacity
expand the country's independent-investigation workforce from 1-in-5,200 to closer to 1-in-1,500
RAA capacity
audit-and-compliance staffing scaled to the multi-decade mega-projects the Crown's horizon authorises
None of these criminalises the phone call. Each, slowly, makes the phone call less necessary. The 58.89% is the structural finding. The fix is to bring that number down — not by enforcement, but by predictability.