SINGAPORE: The Public Service Division (PSD) is reviewing a research paper published by a US-based non-profit organisation that claimed Singapore civil servants disproportionately bought homes near MRT stations that had not yet been publicly announced.
The PSD said on Sept 14 that it is looking at the data and methodology within the academic working paper and will refer any issue to the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau “if there is a material basis to do so”.
“We take any integrity concerns extremely seriously,” said a spokesperson for the department, which sits under the Prime Minister’s Office, in response to queries from the media.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which is a private outfit headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published the working paper titled “Do Social Norms Substitute for Enforcement? Evidence from Public Officials’ Home Purchases in Singapore” in September.
The named authors of the paper are Tomasz Piskorski from Columbia University, Amit Seru and Chun Zhao from Stanford University, and Jian Zhang from the University of Hong Kong.
The authors said that they wanted to study whether pro-integrity social norms could substitute for formal enforcement in deterring misconduct by public officials.
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