The National Integrity Authority (NIA) focuses mainly on the observance of the deadlines for submitting property and personal interests statements and of the form requirements. The efforts to check the property and interests, including to identify unjustified property, remain modest and under the expectations of society. Even if the NIA extended the training process, online training was practically unused. It should be noted that problems are generated by the imperfection of the legal framework, non-functionality of the automated information system e-Integrity and the reduced control capacities of the NIA, shows a monitoring report presented by Transparency International-Moldova. This refers to the anticorruption policies in the central public authorities, namely the declaring of property and interests, ethics and meritocracy.
The monitoring was carried out in April-May 2020, the years 2018-2019 being the reference period. It covered 12 central public authorities, eight of which are ministries and four are subordinate entities with an increased risk of corruption. The last four are the Public Property Agency, the State Tax Service, the Customs Service and the Border Police. The monitoring included the analysis of information provided by the monitored authorities, data from their websites and governmental portals, data from the reports of the NIA, etc.
In a news conference at IPN, TI-Moldova expert Ianina Spinei said the monitoring results show that even if the public authorities made effort to ensure the implementation of policies, the public agents often meet with difficulties in filling out and submitting property and personal interests statements. The training activities are insufficient and some of the authorities do not have internal procedures for declaring property and personal interests and do not publish information about the policy implementation results.
Asked if the integrity inspectors identified particular violations in the property and personal interests statements of public agents of the monitored central public authorities, the NIA related that no violations were found after examining the statements in 2018. Two such cases were identified in 2019, both at the Ministry of Home Affairs, but the NIA didn’t specify the type of deviation.
As regards ethics and meritocracy, anticorruption expert Mariana Kalughin said the State Tax Service got the highest score, while the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research the lowest score. All the monitored entities recruit personnel based on a pre-established legal framework developed by regulations subordinate to laws.
According to the monitoring report, the inaccessibility of some of the departmental regulations is a problem. The activity regulations of the Assessment and Competition Commission can be found only through the search engine on www.google.com. The competition commissions that were created and work based on the aforementioned regulations are responsible for the organization and holding of contests. It should be noted that only one monitored entity furnished the public with information about the composition of the contest commission through its website. This is the State Tax Service.
All the entities that provided information reported training seminars centering on ethics norms, but only one entity, the State Tax Service, developed online training modules. Despite the aforementioned, the public service faces problems related to the application of policies and this is confirmed by the results of TI-Moldova’s poll concerning anticorruption policies that covered public functionaries of the monitored entities.
The report was compiled by Transparency International – Moldova in the framework of the project “Monitoring anticorruption policies in central public authorities” that is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.
