Institutional persistence and the sanctioning gap: A longitudinal archival analysis of Zambia’s domestic resource mobilization (2003–2023)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51867/ajernet.7.3.109Keywords:
Auditor General, Institutional Failure, Domestic Resource Mobilization (DRM), Archival Document Analysis, Zambia, Public Finance ManagementAbstract
Zambia’s fiscal landscape shows a recurring misalignment between formal institutional design and operational outcomes. Despite successive administrative and digital reforms, identical financial irregularities reappear annually since 2003. This paper investigates the “persistence paradox.” This is a phenomenon wherein the same fiscal irregularities and institutional failures repeatedly reoccur and grow over time and remain fully unaffected by subsequent policy improvements or technological upgrades. These include revenue leakage, procurement fraud, and internal control failures that recur across political administrations and technological upgrades. A longitudinal archival document analysis of 21 consecutive Auditor General’s reports (2003 - 2023) was conducted. Automated text-mining in R extracted monetary values of fiscal irregularities; deductive thematic coding grounded in New Institutional Economics (NIE) and Good Governance Theory (GGT) categorized recurring failure modes. Uncollected taxes increased from K2.56 billion (2005) to K97.86 billion (2022). Procurement fraud via “unvouched expenditure” and systemic Value Added Tax (VAT) refund delays (averaging >845 days) are structural features. A critical “Sanctioning Gap,” which is a structural void between the discovery of a financial irregularity by audit institutions and the actual enforcement of a penalty, ultimately leads to institutionalizing a culture of impunity. In the end, formal disciplinary codes are systematically undermined by informal impunity norms, high enforcement transaction costs, and isomorphic mimicry of digital systems. To this effect, Zambia’s 9th National Development Plan (9NDP) must move beyond ceremonial digital adoption and ensure there is elimination of the Sanctioning Gap. It is recommended from this study that: (i) Zambia should legislate automated sanctioning mechanisms; (ii) enforce end-to-end digital integration between Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA), line ministries, and Treasury; (iii) adopt performance contracts based on a “Net Audit Compliance Rate”; (iv) launch a public accountability tracker to close the fiscal social contract deficit.
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