Some 24.6% of the respondents of a poll conducted by Transparency International - Moldova think the institution where they work is affected by corruption. 27.2% of those surveyed answered negatively, while 48.2% avoided answering the question. Among those who answered positively, the greatest corruption is perceived by the employees of the Customs Service (48%), the Border Police (45.8%) and the Ministry of the Interior (29.3%).
The data were collected in the course of October, with the survey involving over 600 respondents from 13 central public authorities and entities managed by these, with an increased corruption risk. The goal of the survey was to analyze the functionaries’ internal perception of the working climate in these institutions and the quality of the applied anticorruption policies.
In a news conference at IPN, TI-Moldova expert Ianina Spinei said that despite the anticorruption training that involved about 60% of those polled and despite the high self-assessment of these, knowledge of the legal framework leaves much to be desired. The respondents do not sufficiently understand notions that are important for the identification and declaring of conflicts of interests and don’t know what the punishment for the violation of the legislation is. The public functionaries should be thus continuously familiarized with the provisions of the anticorruption legislation.
Even if the situations of conflicts of interests in practice occur rather often, less than 2% of the respondents said they experienced such situations during the past two years. It is worrisome that some of them didn’t declare these situations, as they said. Even if the legislation obliges the public functionaries to report cases of corruption and other abuses to the manager of the public entity or the competent authority, about 27% of those questioned said they are not ready to do this for personal security reasons and because they don’t trust the competent bodies or persons.
“The questionnaire was anonymous and we thus hope that they were very sincere and didn’t fear so much that they will be persecuted or followed” said Lilia Carasciuc, Transparency International - Moldova executive director.
The survey shows the public functionaries realize the necessity of continuous training and ask for training on such subjects as the amendments to the legal framework in the area of activity, integrity, foreign languages, personal data protection, etc. The respondents formulated a series of proposals for improving the working climate, noting usually the rise in salaries and the improvement of communication. They would like their superiors to be leaders, not bosses, the tasks to be clearly distributed according to the duties, corruption and politicization to be eliminated.
As regards pays, the respondents would like the ordinary functionaries to get a salary that would be 1.7 times higher than the average salary in the public sector, the salary of a division head to be 2.3 times higher, while the salary of a minister or agency director to be 3.3 times higher.
The report was compiled by Transparency International – Moldova in the framework of the project “Monitoring anticorruption policies in central public authorities”, with the assistance of the National Endowment for Democracy. The poll results will be presented to the State Chancellery.
