The Phone Call Republic

The full numbers

The 2022 NIA distinguishes two very different concepts:

• Experienced corruption — service users who reported actually paying money or favours for service: 9.96 on 10 (i.e., 99.6%+ of service interactions are free of direct bribe). This is genuinely an “Outstanding” rating — Bhutan looks extremely clean on direct bribery.
• Perceived corruption — service users who believe favouritism, family connections, or friendship-based shortcuts shape who gets served first: 6.63 (“Satisfactory”) Within the perceived-corruption category, the specific question — “do you believe personal/family/friendship connections expedite public services?” — drew a positive answer from 58.89% of service users. Two facts coexist: Bhutanese service desks almost never demand a bribe. But the majority of service users believe the path is faster if you know someone — a cousin, a former classmate, a wedding-connection, a village relation.

Imagine this

Two women in Thimphu file the same business-registration application on the same morning. Both are middle-class. Both have complete paperwork. Woman A’s husband is a senior Trade Department officer. Woman B has no government connections. Both follow the official process. Within four days, Woman A’s registration is approved. Woman B’s takes six weeks. Nobody asked for money. Nobody bent any rule. Nobody falsified anything. Woman A’s husband simply mentioned his wife’s application to a colleague at lunch one day. The colleague made a phone call. The file moved up the desk. This is not corruption in the prosecutable sense. It is favouritism — the social acceleration of formal processes through informal networks. The 9.96 score says Bhutan has almost eliminated the first kind. The 58.89% perception says Bhutan has not yet eliminated the second.

Where this came from

Bhutan is small. The civil service is ~30,000 people, in a country of ~777,000. The professional classes (civil servants, bankers, professionals, business owners) are densely interconnected by family, school, marriage, and village. Six-degrees-of-Bhutan is closer to two degrees. In this density, asking a cousin or a former classmate for a “favour” — to move a file along, to confirm a status, to flag a pending application — is normal social behaviour.

The challenge is that the same network density that produces community cohesion also produces favouritism. A meritocratic process requires that two applicants with the same paperwork receive the same speed of service. In a tight-knit society, the social pressure to grant the friend’s favour is high, and the cost of refusing is high. The favouritism is not malice; it is friction-reduction inside a kin-rich network.

Why this matters now

The 58.89% figure has stayed roughly stable across NIA 2009, 2012, 2016, 2019, and 2022. It is not deteriorating, but it is also not improving — meaning the country has not yet found the institutional design that breaks the favouritism pattern despite repeated commitments in successive five-year plans.

The pattern matters most where the favoured-access stakes are highest: business licences, land transactions, scholarship awards, civil-service hiring, hospital referrals, and tender awards. Each of these systems has, in successive ACC reports, been flagged for favouritism risk. Each has had reform attempts (online portals, anonymised reviews, tender e-platforms).

Each has improved on direct-corruption metrics but only modestly on favouritism metrics.

What it should be

A public-service architecture where the file moves the same way for both women — regardless of who their husbands know. Operationally: case-management systems that timestamp every step and publish queue position; anonymised review for licence and scholarship decisions; senior-officer recusal where a personal connection exists; rotation policies that prevent long tenure in single offices; and (most uncomfortably) cultural norms that treat the “do me a favour” call as a violation rather than as normal hospitality.

How others do it

• Singapore — small-society peer; broke favouritism through aggressive civil-service rotation + queueing systems + public scoring of service delivery
• Estonia — small-population peer (~1.3M); broke favouritism through full digitisation: every public process leaves a timestamped, auditable trail, removing the value of a phone call
• Iceland — small-population peer (~370K); similar density to Bhutan; addressed favouritism through transparency in appointments and public-procurement disclosure
• Hong Kong — ICAC’s three-decade anti-favouritism campaign built a culture norm that calling a friend to expedite a file is socially unacceptable
• Bhutan: experienced bribery near-zero; perceived favouritism stable at ~59% for over a decade

The question we should be sitting with

We have broken direct bribery — among the cleanest scores in Asia. We have not broken favouritism. Six in ten of us still believe knowing the right person moves the file faster. What is the institutional design that would let two strangers with the same paperwork get the same service speed in a country this small?