Talk:Corruption in Afghanistan

A fact from Corruption in Afghanistan appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 22 December 2015 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that when a new digital system of payment was put in place to prevent the skimming of salaries for Afghan police, the policemen thought they had been given a raise?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2015/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Corruption in Afghanistan.

Wikipedia

Afghanistan Mid‑importance

	Afghanistan portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Afghanistan, a project to maintain and expand Afghanistan-related subjects on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.AfghanistanWikipedia:WikiProject AfghanistanTemplate:WikiProject AfghanistanAfghanistan articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Verification of DYK entry?[edit]

I was interested in the interesting-sound hook of the DYK entry, and so decided to check it out. The direct source is the MIT Technology Review [1], which says:

When police officers in Afghanistan’s mountainous Wardak province began receiving their $200-per-month salaries via their mobile phones in 2009, many wondered why they had gotten a raise. They hadn’t. It turns out their superiors had been skimming from their salaries, which were previously paid in cash.

That anecdote appears in State Department cables describing M-Paisa, a mobile-phone payment system run by Afghanistan’s largest telecom operator, Roshan, that now reaches 1.2 million Afghans and is described by U.S. officials as a potential “breakthrough technology” for the country.

However, looking directly at the released State Department cables on Wikileaks, I was unable to find the specific anecdote in question. Although there are multiple diplomatic cables regarding M-Paisa, and two [2] [3] cables I located specifically focusing on their pilot program in the Wardak province, I could not find anything approximating the reported anecdote that police officers initially thought that they had received a raise. The closest is the simple acknowledgement that "Several [Afghan National Police] officers reported their salary is 30 percent higher than they thought, an important metric demonstrating the technology's ability to reduce skimming and other corruption."

Have I missed something, are the State Department cables incomplete, or did the authors of the article take some slight creative liberties? Reyne2 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 08:29, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]