Institutional corruption

Institutional corruption is the pattern, documented within public bodies, of placing the protection of an institution's own reputation above fidelity to the truth, most visibly during an independent or public inquiry into that institution's conduct. The concept is deliberately narrower than corruption in general: it is defined specifically by an institution's willingness to slow, obstruct or otherwise frustrate the work of a formal, independent inquiry examining it, rather than by bribery, fraud or other classic forms of individual corrupt dealing. Writers on the subject have pointed to institutions such as the Metropolitan Police and various National Health Service trusts in Britain as documented examples of bodies accused of prioritizing image management over open cooperation with inquiries into their own failures, treating the instinct to protect institutional standing as itself a distinct and recurring failure mode that formal inquiries are specifically designed, and often struggle, to overcome.