UC Berkeley

Preventing corruption and, particularly, the one initiated from the Public Sector itself, is a shared concern amongst democracies from the OECD. Comparative studies carried out by that international organization have found persuasive arguments in favor of implementing the public policies commonly referred as Declarations of Assets and of Interests. Mexico introduced them into its legal system since 2002 and passed major legal reforms in the 2015-2016 period. Yet, in my opinion, the results in that jurisdiction are, as of today, questionable.The public policies’ rationale argues that corruption in the Public Sector as a whole can be prevented by coercively requiring public officials to periodically declare to the government detailed personal information concerning their wealth’s evolution and potential conflicts of interests. Such information is to be used for two main purposes: (a) enhancing the investigators’ capabilities for detecting potential acts of corruption, especially illicit enrichment, and (b) making mandatory disclosures of what officials declare and of what anticorruption institutions perform, so that democratic accountability upon them can be exerted. Considering intricacies of Mexico’s legal framework, trying to look at the public public policies through the eyes of bureaucracy and drawing from a variety of literature that can be connected using the theory of Responsive Law formulated by Berkeley Law Professors Philippe Nonet & Philip Selznick, I argue that the aforementioned Declarations’ effectiveness could have important improvements in Mexico by exploring three measures: (1) Balancing the values of privacy and governmental transparency; (2) Standardizing investigators’ methods for the verification of what officials declare and the detection of red flags for the initiation of legal cases; (3) Generating public information to evaluate the integrity of officials and the performance of anticorruption institutions. Based on a purposive reading of current statutes’ provisions instead of major legal reforms, I delineate three proposals —one for each measure— aiming to entice speculation and discussion. In this regard, I argue that it is important to bear in mind Mexico’s society context of a generalized use of information technologies, particularly those whose functioning require access to internet, and to expand on the idea that the worldwide access to such technologies —as well as their sophistication— are expected to increase as time passes by.