Page 18 - Service Delivery Review

2022 Public Service Ethics Survey

§ At 47%, awareness of the existence of a hotline to report unethical behaviour anonymously is relatively
low, which is worrying since more than half of respondents indicate that they would prefer to report mis-
conduct anonymously.

§ Also of concern is that there is still considerable mistrust in processes for reporting misconduct, let alone
the willingness to act on such reports. The survey suggests that 59% of people who observed miscon-
duct did not report it. Again, this seemed to ride on the fear of victimisation and the general lack of con-
sequence management, all pointing to the need for improvements in these areas.

§ On the positive side, there have been marginal improvements in all three areas of the survey that have his-
toric data (i.e. ethical behaviour, ethical culture, and ethics management). While this might be partially due
to differences in sampling, other messages show the growing positive influence of ethics management
over the years. For one, there is a correlation between departments having stronger ethics management,
stronger ethical cultures, and less misconduct. This improvement is also linked to improved audit out-
comes and improved service delivery.

§ A new addition to the 2022 Public Sector Ethics Survey is the section on lifestyle audits. In this regard,
most respondents believe that a lifestyle audit will effectively reduce corruption, and almost 90% of
respondents said they would be open to undergoing a lifestyle audit themselves. This result shows that
public servants are willing to play their part in reducing corruption. Therefore, the work of ethics officers is
likely to be welcomed, giving them a better chance of being change agents in their organisations.

18 SERVICE DELIVERY REVIEW | Volume 15 • No. 2 of 2022/2023