The core design problem is that nobody's job is currently 'independently re-run the World Bank's, Transparency International's, and similar bodies' numbers before the numbers go live.' ).

Mechanism: the consortium doesn't wait for institutions to volunteer transparency.

It uses existing legal and diplomatic leverage that already exists but goes unused -- most index-producing bodies (World Bank, Transparency International) are subject to information-disclosure policies or are donor-funded by governments that can condition continued funding on raw microdata access for a vetted, firewalled academic auditor pool.

, staff involved in loan negotiations with a ranked country) had sign-off authority on that country's score. That score gets published alongside -- and before -- each index's own release, the same week, so policymakers and journalists citing the number see the audit grade in the same breath.

Funding comes from a consortium of universities plus philanthropic sources structurally independent from the index-producing institutions themselves (explicitly not World Bank trust funds), to avoid recreating the exact conflict-of-interest problem this is meant to catch. Phase one targets only the highest-stakes indices (those cited in sovereign credit models or aid conditionality) rather than trying to audit everything at once.

This doesn't stop an institution from manipulating data if it's determined to. What it does is collapse the multi-year detection lag from 'internal whistleblower eventually talks' to 'independent audit grade published in the same news cycle as the index,' which is the actual lever that changes incentives -- manipulation stops being a bet that nobody will notice for years and becomes a bet that a standing auditor notices within one publication cycle.