Despite having only three months left before retirement, Public Sector Anti-Corruption Commission (PACC) secretary-general Prayong Preeyajit is committed to vigorously chasing culprits behind high-profile graft cases.
The PACC, which was formed in 2008, focuses on corruption cases involving low-ranking state officials, while the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC), the independent body, zeroes in on politicians and high-ranking officials.
Mr Prayong rose through the ranks at the Justice Ministry, where he initially worked for the Office of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB). He was then moved to the PACC, where he was finally promoted to the post of secretary-general under the government of Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha in 2014.
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He also currently serves as secretary of the Centre for National Anti-Corruption (CNAC), set up at the behest of Gen Prayut in 2014 to help combat corruption.
Shortly after Mr Prayong was promoted to the top job at the PACC, the agency was brought to serve under the Prime Minister's Office. Mr Prayong is set to retire at the end of September.
Mr Prayong said he plans to return to his home province of Kamphaeng Phet, where he will take up farming on his 30-40 rai of land. He plans to turn the land into banana, mango and coconut orchards and wishes to spend his final years with his family members there.
In his remaining time in office, Mr Prayong said he will zero in on the country's key graft cases which are courting public attention, such as alleged malfeasance in the rice-pledging scheme and alleged embezzlement of temple maintenance funds.
The PACC is responsible for inquiries in the rice-pledging cases while the CNAC has to deal with the process of finding basic information on the cases, which needs to be done jointly with the Royal Thai Police and the Department of Special Investigation.
"Much progress has been made in the investigation into the cases," said Mr Prayong. ''Complete evidence has been obtained in 221 cases, 60 of which led to suspects being summoned to acknowledge charges," said Mr Prayong. "These cases are not difficult to probe but the investigation was slowed down due to a huge number of related documents."
Prayong: zeroing in on the country's key graft cases
Mr Prayong said the CNAC will play a role in finding out whether the transgression took place because of individuals or a shoddy system. If the latter is found to be a problem, work must be done to fix it, he said. Other important cases being pursued by the PACC concern forest encroachment and malfeasance in project procurement by officials, he said.
"As for past investigations, the prime minister has not instructed anything in particular, but only said the proceeding must not be biased. It is fortunate no one has come to interfere in the process," said Mr Prayong.
He said Gen Prayut always emphasises that he wants to see preventive measures in place to ward off future corruption. The premier also noted that if graft suppression is swift, fair and decisive, it would serve as a deterrent, he said.
It is also important to look for reasons which embolden people to commit malfeasance and fix them as well as speed up the process to bring culprits to justice and quickly punish them, he said.
According to the PACC secretary-general, the causes of corruption among officials include three elements -- the officials themselves who are vulnerable to be drawn to corruption, the loopholes in the administration system, and people's confidence they will not be prosecuted for their offence.
If superiors in state agencies take this issue seriously and launch swift disciplinary action against culprits, this would dim chances of other officials committing similar acts, he said.
He noted the ratio of officials found to have committed malfeasance was substantial among low-ranking officers as they number more than two million across the country.
Fraud is sometimes found in top-down form, where policy-level officials gave orders and low-ranking ones followed suit.
Dozens of civil servants are dismissed for criminal charges and disciplinary breaches every year, he said. Since 2013, the PACC's subcommittees have probed more than 4,000 corruption cases, 500 of them were concluded to have grounds for guilt. More than 20 of them have been forwarded to public prosecutors.
The PACC has 300 officials who have to deal with a huge number of corruption cases each year. Some cases still have loopholes for suspects to slip through and the legal procedures involved are too long, he said. "The disciplinary action is likely to curb graft more effectively."
Mr Prayong said National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) Order No 69/57 helped step up efforts to clamp down on corruption as supervisors of the graft-hit organisations who fail to address the problem would also be subject to disciplinary breaches. Either the PACC or NACC would have to step in to deal with these people.
He noted a lot of corruption had taken place before the military takeover on May 22, 2014. "In the civil service at that time, officials failed to do their duty but served politicians who committed malfeasance," Mr Prayong said.
But in the past three years, more crooked officials have been jailed and the Central Criminal Court for Corruption and Misconduct Cases was established, he said, adding the NACC and the PACC have been reinforced with more personnel and laws were amended to plug loopholes allowing graft.
"In the internal administration, no one has asked or ordered me (to do things in their favour) and this is the sincerity of the executives, including the prime minister and his deputies," said Mr Prayong. "There are only those not in power who told us that we should do this and that, but we did not follow their requests."