The agency will need sufficient financial resources to attract skilled employees to evaluate and verify information from the regulated entity. These conditions too are within the power of the state to provide. The issue of allocating sufficient resources to staff public agencies with educated and qualified civil servants is one that deserves serious consideration. States need public employees with sufficient education and skills to perform these services, incentive systems that link pay to performance, and salary structures that enable the employees to support their families without having to supplement their pay, often by resorting to corrupt behavior. Rather than pay the political price of civil service layoffs, cash-strapped governments have kept workers on and squeezed wages instead.
Low wages provide a fertile breeding ground for corruption.
Widespread corrupt behavior undermines political legitimacy, demoralizes public employees and ordinary citizens, hurts a country's ability to attract foreign capital, and results in an allocation of resources not based on law or economic merits but on the bribe giver's ability to pay. In short, widespread corruption raises transaction costs. Similarly, a perception of unjust behavior and manipulation of the system by predatory elites raises the costs of transactions for all. Fortunately, a growing anticorruption movement is gaining momentum internationally and starting to show results. The United Nations adopted a declaration against it in December 1996.