On December 10, 2003, Coalition 2000 presented the latest corruption indexes of the business sector based on a survey of businessmen in Bulgaria, conducted between October 13 and November 4, 2003.
According to the opinion of Bulgarian businessmen, corruption continues to be the most acute problem, although not as much as before. The corruption attractiveness of building permits and granting credits, and therefore the corruption pressure for illegal payments in these areas, is increasing. During the last three months, the part of the corruption deals connected with tax evasion has doubled. But the most common reason for making illegal payments is avoiding fines for civil offences.
Still, a critical sphere is public procurement, where 41,2 % of business representatives claim that they have paid illegal sums, i.e. corruption has become a practice, and paying bribes for winning a public procurement has turned to be a general condition or a tacit agreement of the deal. Thus, businessmen are confronted with the dilemma: whether to refuse to pay a bribe and risk their business, or to tempt to pay. As a whole, the susceptibility of businessmen to pay a bribe in order to win a public procurement of a contract with a big-scale company tends to increase.
As for the government actions for curbing corruption, since the beginning of the year, the 39 % of the businessmen reckon that the government is doing nothing in this respect.
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