When Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, many believed it would lead to more secure, transparent and less corrupt borders. New regulations, infrastructure modernisation and digitalised customs procedures all followed. European standards and money arrived together.

Yet corruption did not disappear at the Kapitan Andreevo border checkpoint, the main land crossing between Bulgaria and Türkiye and one of the busiest gateways between Europe and Asia. Instead, it evolved.

This is the central finding of a recent article by the Prevention, Research and Innovation team of the Basel Institute on Governance – Dr Jacopo Costa, Dr Claudia Baez Camargo, Noémi Jäger and Dr Saba Kassa – published in the Journal of Illicit Trade, Financial Crime, and Compliance.

The article examines how criminal networks, smugglers, businesses and corrupt officials adapted to Bulgaria’s EU integration. It illustrates how corruption behaves like an adaptive ecosystem: when regulations and border control technologies change, corruption changes with them.

A border built for opportunity – legal and illegal

Border spaces concentrate discretionary power in the hands of customs officers, border guards, inspectors and regulators, while bringing together also traders, transport companies, migrants, smugglers, criminal groups and political actors.

Kapitan Andreevo is a particularly instructive case due to its strategic location, with thousands of trucks, travellers and goods passing through the border checkpoint daily.

Before Bulgaria’s EU accession, corruption at the checkpoint was already deeply embedded. The 1990s brought economic crisis, shortages of consumer goods, weak state capacity and rapidly expanding informal markets. Smuggling became a profitable survival strategy.

Border officials could be bribed to overlook undeclared goods, counterfeit products and tax evasion. Duty-free shops in the "no man's land" between Bulgaria and Türkiye became hubs for smuggling cigarettes, alcohol and petroleum products.

Corruption operated at multiple levels:

• everyday exchanges between traders, drivers and officials, often based on long-standing personal relationships, at the lower level
• connections between politicians, senior civil servants, business elites and organised crime at the higher level.

Smuggling routes required political protection. Profits flowed upward through patronage systems.

EU accession changed the rules of the game

Bulgaria’s EU accession radically transformed the legal and institutional environment. The country had to align its customs regulations, VAT rules, excise tax systems, phytosanitary standards and border procedures with EU standards – a gradual process requiring significant investment. The reforms affected almost every aspect of border governance.

Customs procedures became increasingly digitalised. New systems such as the VAT Information Exchange System (VIES) and the Excise Movement and Control System (EMCS) improved cross-border monitoring.

Phytosanitary and veterinary inspections became stricter. Migration controls tightened through alignment with Schengen rules and access to systems like the Schengen Information System (SIS) and international databases of stolen documents and vehicles.

Meanwhile, new border control technologies – X-ray machines, scanners, thermal cameras and risk-analysis tools – expanded the state’s capacity to detect illicit activity.

From a policy perspective, this appeared to be a modernisation success story. But criminal systems rarely remain static when the environment changes.

Corruption did not decline – it adapted

The most striking finding is that stronger controls often increase the strategic value of corruption.

After EU accession, crossing the border illegally became more difficult, risky and expensive. Corruption became necessary not only to speed up procedures but to bypass sophisticated control and regulatory systems.

In other words, modernisation transformed the function of corruption: Criminal actors began targeting specialised procedures, such as food safety inspections, VAT systems, automated license plate recognition, laboratory testing and digital customs controls.

VAT fraud and the manipulation of digital systems

VAT fraud illustrates this adaptation clearly. Within the EU, exports are often subject to a VAT rate of 0 (zero) percent, which means companies can reclaim any VAT they have already paid domestically. Criminal actors exploited this through "carousel fraud" schemes involving fictitious transactions chains.

At Kapitan Andreevo border checkpoint, for example, corruption allegedly enabled traders to manipulate customs procedures. One method involved corrupt officials manually entering fake truck registrations into customs systems to simulate border crossings, enabling fraudulent VAT refunds for exports that never occurred.

Even more revealing was the manipulation of automated license plate recognition: corrupt actors reportedly disabled automated recognition and manually entered altered plates using Cyrillic characters resembling Latin letters, allowing smugglers to bypass alerts and inspections.

This illustrates a pattern seen in many modern corruption systems: digitalisation does not automatically eliminate corruption. Instead, corruption turns towards the technological systems themselves.

Food safety, privatisation and rent-seeking

EU food safety and phytosanitary regulations created new bottlenecks and forms of discretionary authority. The research describes two recurring manipulation strategies:

• selective sampling during inspections, where officials took samples only from "clean" sections of shipments; and
• falsification of laboratory tests to certify unsafe products as compliant.

These risks increased after some border functions were outsourced to private companies. At Kapitan Andreevo, food testing, parking operations and vehicle disinfection were privatised. This reform, intended to increase efficiency, allegedly created new opportunities for rent extraction.

The controversy surrounding Eurolab 2011, which reportedly obtained monopolistic control over food safety testing under questionable legal arrangements became emblematic of these tensions.

The broader implication: privatisation of public functions does not necessarily reduce corruption risks. It can shift them into hybrid public-private arrangements where accountability is weaker and oversight is more fragmented.

The rise of “routinised” corruption

The study highlights the increased organisation of corruption itself. Today, no single official can independently guarantee a smuggling route. Procedures involve multiple agencies, overlapping inspections and layered oversight.

As a result, corruption evolved towards collective coordination. Customs officers, border guards, supervisors, intermediaries and sometimes political actors participate in networks where bribes are pooled and redistributed.

These schemes resemble coordinated organisational systems with revenue-sharing mechanisms, internal hierarchies and protection structures rather than isolated rogue actors.

This reflects an important conceptual change: border corruption can function as an embedded institutional ecosystem sustained through cooperation, mutual dependence and political protection.

Drug trafficking: when corruption becomes too risky

Interestingly, corruption is not always the preferred strategy. In drug trafficking, for example, the risks are dramatically higher. Border officials caught facilitating drug trafficking could face severe criminal penalties, including organised crime charges and lengthy prison sentences.

As a result, traffickers increasingly invest in sophisticated concealment methods. One example is the "twin trucks" strategy: several nearly identical trucks carrying similar cargo cross the border simultaneously during heavy traffic, with only one of them containing drugs. Since inspection capacity is limited, the probability is high that the "clean" trucks are checked while the drug shipment passes undetected.

This shows that corruption and criminality do not always go hand in hand. Sometimes, stronger anti-corruption measures push criminals towards deception and concealment rather than bribery.

The bigger lesson: criminal systems are adaptive

The case study of the Kapitan Andreevo border crossing is not just about Bulgaria. Policymakers often assume that more technology, controls and regulation will automatically reduce corruption and illicit trade.

But criminal systems and corruption adapt. Informal networks reorganise around the vulnerabilities created by reforms. Every regulatory innovation creates new incentives, bottlenecks and opportunities for exploitation.

This does not mean reforms are useless. Many EU measures have clearly strengthened border management. However, reforms must be designed with an understanding of adaptive behaviour. Otherwise, states risk producing unintended consequences: stronger incentives for bribery, use of alternative trafficking routes, technological manipulation, new forms of collusion or opaque privatisation structures.

I and my co-authors argue for a more integrated approach that combines anti-corruption and anti-crime strategies. We also emphasise the importance of anticipatory governance and foresight-oriented policymaking that try to predict how illicit actors will respond to institutional changes before reforms are implemented.

This may be the most important lesson from Kapitan Andreevo. Borders are not static lines defended by static institutions against static threats. They are evolving ecosystems where states, markets, technologies and criminal actors constantly adapt to one another.

Learn more

• Access the full article, “The Evolution of Corruption and Crimes at Kapitan Andreevo Border Checkpoint: The Impact of EU Accession”.
• Read our Quick Guide 38 to border corruption for a short introduction.
• Read our Working Paper 58, “Corruption as a facilitator of drug trafficking in the port of Rotterdam” for a related analysis.