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.

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Verification of DYK entry?

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]