A recently released survey on corruption has shown that most Slovenians believe that corruption is a major problem in the country, although very few have actually had any experience with corruption recently.

Presenting a survey dubbed Views on Corruption 2003, the director of the Government Office for the Prevention of Corruption said that corruption is a serious problem that impedes Slovenia's potentials, and has caused it to lose some of the advantage it used to have over other transition countries. The gravity of the situation, according to Boštjan Penko, is clear from the kind of corruption which is most frequent in Slovenia - a form of corruption that is very difficult to identify, as it is mostly present in high ranks. Given the inefficiency of Slovenia's institutions, and the lack of pressure on the part of the civil society, this issue is very difficult to handle, Penko said.

Like last year, the survey was conducted on behalf of the anticorruption office by the Public Opinion Research Centre of the Ljubljana Faculty of Social Sciences. This year's results show no particular variations, noted Samo Uhan of this faculty. What emerges from the study is that the average citizen does not participate in corrupt practices that occur at higher levels. The researchers have therefore concluded that there is a pattern in this field that is typical of today's Western societies where the most frequent form of corruption is corruption in the ranks of the political and economic elite.

Asked how big a problem corruption is for Slovenia, more than half of the respondents said that the problem is big (29.4%) or very big (30.8%). Some 28.7 percent said that corruption is neither a big nor a small problem, while a total of less than 5 percent said that corruption is a small or very small problem.

The respondents were also asked whether they had had any experience with corruption recently. Almost 95 percent gave a negative answer, with only 3.9 percent answering affirmatively. This could mean that a great part of the population would hardly ever have the possibility to be involved in corrupt practices, Uhan noted.

Assessing the prevalence of corruption in public services, 45.9 percent of respondents said that a lot of public servants accept bribes, while 32.7 percent said that only some do it. Just over 9 percent maintain that all public servants take bribes, with only 1.8 percent convinced that no public servant would do that. Asked to list the most common causes of corruption, the respondents quoted low fines (22.9 percent), inefficient prosecution (19.4 percent), insufficient legislation (18.4 percent) and force of habit (13.7 percent). The respondents most often encountered corruption in public procurement procedures (29 percent), privatisation (22.3 percent), customs procedures (16.6 percent) and police procedures (15.7 percent).

Only about 52 percent of the respondents would report corruption cases if they knew about them. Most of them would contact police (34.6 percent) and the anti-corruption office (32.6 percent). Last year, 47 percent said they would go to police and only 22 percent to the anti-corruption office. The conclusion that an increasing number of people would report the cases to the anti-corruption office suggests that there is a lack of trust in other institutions. "This is a signal for all those who hold decision-making mechanisms, to react and ensure a more efficient and coordinated approach of Slovenian institutions," Penko said.

Conducted between October 13 and 15, the survey included 901 respondents.