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In 2004, the Canadian government appointed an ethics commissioner reporting directly to Parliament. I show how an appeal of the ethics commissioner finds its traction in three problem areas. First, there is an increasing distaste in Canada for patronage and other similar forms of partisanship in politics, but there is general uncertainty about the constitutional or ethical standards that ought to apply. Second, the language of democratic criticism and reform of Parliament is rooted less in actual constitutional practice than in an idealized sense of how Parliament ought to work, a problem that is exacerbated by the ongoing presence of the American example. Finally, these both feed into a growing disengagement from traditional party politics and a desire for more “independent” or non-partisan checks on government, of which the Office of the Auditor General is becoming a popular exemplar. As an independent, Parliamentary, and non-partisan check on government, the ethics commissioner appears to serve as at least a partial solution to much of what is wrong with the Canadian political system.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the reflection of corruption in Brazilian companies listed on Brasil, Bolsa, Balcão (B3). The methodological design comprised a qualitative and descriptive approach in which documentary research was used to gather data. Content analysis was employed to treat data retrieved from Standard Financial Statements, Explanatory Notes, and Sustainability Reports, from 2013 to 2017. The findings reveal a low level of disclosure of the companies listed on B3 concerning the reflections of corruption. The disclosed reflections include the increase in the company's operating costs and the impact on the company's future cash flow which can be direct, such as through the reduction of revenues from canceled negotiations, or indirect, through transaction costs due to the misconduct of the company.

The tsunami that swept the shores of Sri Lanka on December 26, 2004, killed over 30,000 people regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliations. This article deals with a different conflict – one fashioned by human beings, which has caused the loss of an estimated 70,000 lives. The vast majority of the lives lost have been from the minority Tamil population. The basic argument of this article is that the desire to uphold a unitary state in Sri Lanka established by the British colonial rulers in 1833 has really been the desire to establish Sinhala hegemony over the minorities, particularly the Tamil minority.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan found itself cut out from Moscow's subsidies that constituted 10% of its GDP at that time (World Bank, 2003). Kyrgyzstan's economy went into severe crisis as it was interwoven into the economic infrastructure of the other republics of the former Soviet Union, which were also disintegrating. Hence, the most urgent issue on the agenda of the government and donors was economic recovery and stabilization. Partly because of this excessive external economic dependency, the new government was forced to seek out funds from donors in exchange for a commitment to a series of institutional reforms.

English local government audit has gone through fundamental change in the last decade and this period of instability looks certain to continue. Since 2014, councils have been audited by private sector auditors appointed theoretically by the councils themselves (though an overwhelming majority of councils have delegated this responsibility). The scope of audit after 2014 reduced to focus mainly on top-down financial management, rather than value for money or inspection. After growing concerns about the scope and quality of audit however, in 2020, the government commissioned Sir Tony Redmond to review local audit arrangements in England. The Redmond review identified several problems with the reformed structure and made recommendations for change. Currently, the sector is uncertain about what changes will be adopted to solve the issues discovered by Redmond.

This chapter assesses public administration in Paraguay. It argues that the country's public administration and public personnel structures have been shaped by a predominance of informal decision-making norms, patron–client relations, exceptional legislative interference in what elsewhere tend to be executive prerogatives, and weak accountability mechanisms of a state largely captured by a small oligarchy. In this context, administrative reform has been mostly instigated by external actors—donors and international financial institutions—and only achieved incremental progress in, in particular, the modernization of public finance institutions during periods of economic crises or political change when external demand coincided with domestic pressure. Except for some “pockets of efficiency,” Paraguay thus remains a benchmark case of a neopatrimonial state in a formally democratic Presidential system, in which informal patron–client relations trump formal bureaucratic structures—albeit one in which the legislature has exceptional influence over administrative matters and public sector jobs are exceptionally dominant in clientelist exchanges of state resources.