Unfortunately it's seldom possible to rule out their accepting payment or other compensation as they won't allow that to be part of the contract.

Further, people are inherently corrupt, at least to some extent. For many of them, their corrupt nature says, "In for a penny, in for a pound" and the result is that you not only get "screwed" a little bit, but as much as they can arrange, if it benefits them.

Look at the recent events on Wall Street. Major investment firms were promoting investments that they, themselves, were betting would decline in value, causing losses for their own customers.

The whole concept of "good vs. evil" is a fallacy. If we base our notion of what's corrupt on that, or any related notion, we're in for a rough ride. The fact is, most of the time, what's good for one is evil for another, somewhere. Pumping petroleum out of the ground is good for those who process and sell it, but it's evil for everyone including themselves if one considers the environmental impacts. Selling equities on the market is good for those who profit, but bad for those who are subsequently owners of overvalued equities. The entier business of selling shares in a company that you're selling for someone else means that someone is buying higher risk. You buy a stock at what you consider a fair value, based on its prior performance, and then a broker attempts to sell it at a higher cost so that you, and he, of course, can profit. If you've paid a fair price, then the one to whom the shares are sold is getting overvalued shares. How is that equitable? The real value of the shares doesn't go up just because you want to profit.

Now we have people here in the U.S. who think they'd like us to privatize our social security system, so that they can profit on the ensuing transactions. It's all a house of cards! What happens to the system when the house of cards collapses?

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