Casinos and Integrity

Sometimes, I must admit, I cannot understand the logic of our government. The latest comes in the form of casino patronage and the integrity of the civil service, which, according to our prime minister, is somehow linked. A new ruling requires civil servants who visit our local casinos more than four times a month, or who buy an annual pass, must declare their casino patronage.

This, will, apparently boost the integrity of the public service. How does this work?

I suppose this has to do with gambling. But, isn’t Toto and 4D also gambling? Should we not also ask those who buy Toto or 4D too often to also declare their habit? People do get addicted to this too eh. There’s probably much larger sums of monies involved in gambling at casinos, but hey, some people do spend more than they can afford on Toto and 4D too.

Then, what about overseas casinos? It’s not okay to gamble at local casinos, but that’s alright if it happens outside Singapore borders?

There’s some logic in linking gambling to integrity. It goes like this. If you gamble, it’s possible that you’d get addicted, and get into debt. Then, you may get tempted to act corruptly at work, taking advantage of position or opportunity. Yes. We can pretty much understand that.

But there could be so many other ways civil servants could be tempted to get corrupt. There are best practices to take care of that, such as job rotation. I’m not sure what a declaration of casino patronage is supposed to do. Are supervisors supposed to mark their subordinates who patronise casinos too often? I don’t think that’s fair at all.

So, what’s the big deal about patronising our local casinos? I think this is more of a (failed) public show to get people to trust in the integrity of the civil service, the integrity being one of the issues the prime minister wanted to talk about at this year’s civil service work plan seminar.