Fake fathers and birth certificates, ill-gotten pink cards, civil service exam cheating and nominees for predatory foreign business operators … the list goes on and on. How many more of these “rackets” have to be uncovered before such transgressions are seen as the single issue that they are — a deeply ingrained disregard for the security and sanctity of the nation.

Treating these cases as separate, or at the most loosely linked, is not sufficient. It can and should be argued that they constitute one overarching problem.

Even if the susceptibility of public servants, or even members of the general public, to being compromised has become old hat for Thailand, these most recent flare-ups should still provide grounds for a major rethink of what motivates so many in Thailand to carelessly sell off bits and pieces of the country’s stability.

You might read this as a repeat of my calls for a merciless removal of cheating civil servants and for the criminality of local nominees to be properly highlighted, but a larger point seems to be emerging.

Thailand is suffering these violations due to an epidemic of short-sightedness, both at the personal level when weighing one’s gains against the best interests of society, and at the official level when dealing with these myopic individuals.

This past Tuesday, seven people, three of them civil servants, were taken into custody after it was found that over 1,300 foreign children had been knowingly registered as residents of Din Daeng district’s low-income housing complex.

The bogus paperwork led to the issuance of pink cards, 13-digit identification cards that give holders access to Thai public services despite not being Thai citizens.

Reports indicated that the Department of Provincial Administration had only begun to notice the irregularly high number of registrations in Din Daeng in April. The number of people being registered in the flats was not just more than usual, while only a handful of addresses were home to hundreds of pink-card holders.

In some cases, tens of individuals were listed as residing in a single housing unit that could barely support a small family.

Investigations turned up a multitude of other corrupt practices, such as documents being signed in advance of their usage and plainly forged signatures to steal identities.

Further probes are going back as far as 2017, for now, but there is every likelihood the search will have to track back even further.

According to latest updates, the process used to secure the pink cards at the Din Daeng Flats was probably employed nationwide, meaning that the country is looking at thousands more cases.

Network of corruption

Uprooting this operation has required the discovery of an entire network, involving district officials, hospital staff and Thai men, who together effectively sold authentic birth certificates proving Thai citizenship for foreign newborns.

The latest arrests included a 53-year-old man identified only as Pradit, who was found to be listed as the father of six children to three separate women.

Pradit joins the hundreds of Thais taken in for acting as nominees to legitimise businesses that would otherwise be unable to operate within the Kingdom.

Almost all of these crimes involve government clerks and other civil servants, people on the inside willing to overlook plainly flawed paperwork or who actively ensure that erroneous documentation is pushed through.

Those hundreds add to the thousands now shown to have never been worthy of their posts at all because they acquired those roles through bribery and cheating.

How many tainted systems and unscrupulous officials can Thailand “expose” before it has to be acknowledged that they have infested important public services?

How brazen and blatant can these crimes be before it is accepted they were carried out with an offensive level of contempt and an assured sense of impunity?

Corrosion from within

Citizenship fraud, business misrepresentation and malicious dishonesty can no longer be treated as isolated infractions because their impacts are no longer disparate. They are a collective corrosion, eating away at the country from within.

No amount of arrests or expulsions can turn the tide on this matter until a proactive effort is mounted. Rather than only monitoring against breaches, screening should take place to vet the moral fibre of public officials.

Fundamental work should be done to replace the general disregard we now witness with a genuine understanding of how short-term personal gains can lead to real and irreversible damage.

The country’s moral education has to shift weight from “respect for seniors” and “acting with grace” to self-sacrifice and resilience in the face of temptation.

Perhaps for the quickest results, those crimes discussed in this piece should be collapsed into a single category of offence: treason. Compromising housing, birth and business registrations is compromising public order and lying one’s way into civil office is a violation against public decency.

If what is motivating these transgressions is short-sightedness, a vision of the possible future shaped by such actions must be brought into undeniable clarity.