The Necessity of Acting in the Public Interest: Corruption and Fraud in the Public Sector

Introduction: The Concept Of Public Interest

The concept of public interest (Canning and O'Dwyer, 2001: 728), which is an issue where universal acceptance cannot be achieved as to what it is and how it can be measured, has an interdisciplinary importance and meaning today. Moreover, according to Sturm (1978 cited in Dellaportas and Davenport, 2007: 1084), it is at the centre of interpretations in political and social life.

Although the roots of the concept of public interest in the modern sense were first introduced by the French Revolution of 1789 (Saraç, 2002: 1), it can be said that the concept originated from the “common good” applied in England in the 17th century (Dellaportas and Davenport, 2007: 1084). Traditionally, common good is clearly a political idea and consists of some specific goals designed to promote the general well-being of all people, such as peace, order, prosperity and justice. Special goals, which were surrounded by common good until the mid-17th century, led to the collapse of medieval feudalism in England and the gradual disappearance of common good with the rise of national monarchies, and to clarify the distinction between common good and public good (Douglass, 1980, p. 107). In this context, the concept of public interest, which took its place as a separate concept in the literature, developed primarily with its managers or representatives interested in the material welfare of individuals rather than the welfare of the state. Then led to the attachment of individual welfare to the property rights and private interests of British property owners (Dellaportas and Davenport, 2007).

Although the public interest has developed its own identity, it remains a concept that cannot determine the content of the public or public interest. According to Gunn, the basis of this is that the term “interest has no definite meaning (Dellaportas and Davenport, 2007). The effects of uncertainty in the concept of interest can be found in P. Herring's study. According to the author, in fact the laws passing through the parliament are full of uncertainties and sometimes are 'parliamentary' activities that sometimes occur 'so that they do not grow', and the task of bureaucrats is to produce public policies which are operative from these unqualified obligations, and even this process can often be described as the public good itself (Shafritz et al. ., 2015). In addition to Herring expression, Flathman (cited in Dik, 2005: 3) points the process as a tool that the government considers while producing policies and provides legitimacy for the administration to carry out its activities easily.

Today, the concept of public interest, which forms the basis of the state and administration in the modern sense, tries to get rid of the uncertainty mentioned above and the law itself and everything that is legal, is defined as public interest (Saraç, 2002). In this study, first, explanations of corruption and fraud are brought to the necessity of the concept of public interest for both the private and public sectors. Then, in the context of the necessity of acting in the public interest for public institutions, explanations and evaluations regarding the phenomenon of corruption and fraud are given.