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Corruption and Accountability in Bhutan
Bhutan’s formal accountability infrastructure is unusually strong for a country of its size and income. The Anti-Corruption Commission was constituted in 2006 and has prosecuted cases at every tier of the civil service. The Royal Audit Authority publishes detailed Annual Audit Reports each year, with line-item findings against agencies. The Office of the Attorney General handles state prosecution. The National Integrity Assessment, conducted by the ACC, surveys citizen perception of public-sector integrity across nine sectors and on a regular cadence.
By aggregate measures, the country performs well. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index typically places Bhutan in the upper half of Asian countries. Survey findings on outright bribery are low. The institutions exist, they are funded, they are staffed, and they file public reports.
The informal accountability layer runs in parallel and is the more interesting subject. The 2022 National Integrity Assessment found that 58.89% of Bhutanese citizens believe favouritism speeds up service delivery — not corruption in the prosecutable sense, but the phone call from a relative that moves a file faster than waiting in the queue would. Roughly six in ten Bhutanese have, by the same survey, used personal connections to obtain a routine government service. 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.
The audit data shows a related pattern. Total construction-procurement irregularities reported by the RAA reached Nu 9,987 million in FY 2024–25 — more than double the FY 2021–22 figure. But the increase is concentrated: Nu 7,790 million (78% of the total) is attributable to a single mega-project, Punatsangchhu-II. The other 22% is spread across hundreds of smaller projects and agencies. The visible royal-vision project absorbs disproportionate institutional attention; the audit-and-compliance apparatus that should monitor it is smaller than the project demands.
The work of the next twenty years is to build the second-order infrastructure that closes the gap between the formal accountability layer and the informal one. Not by criminalising favouritism — most of the 59% who use connections are using them for legitimate routine services that should not require a personal call — but by making the formal layer fast and predictable enough that the informal layer becomes unnecessary.
Read these in order
- Chapter Five — The Phone Call That Moves the File — the structural framing.
- Paradox #43 — Six in ten believe the phone call moves the file — the headline NIA finding.
- Paradox #41 — Two in three complaints aren’t about corruption — what the ACC actually receives.
- Paradox #40 — Eight billion ngultrum hiding in one project — the audit concentration.
- Paradox #42 — A 2.4 out of 10 on election integrity — citizen perception of the electoral process.
- Paradox #25 — A regulator’s fine ate the bank’s year — the BoB core-banking-migration case.
- Paradox #53 — One journalist per 5,200 Bhutanese — the media capacity that should be covering all of this.