Chisinau needs strategy for ensuring transparency, report

The Association of Independent Press (API) presented the final report of the team that monitored the use of public money in the municipality of Chisinau. The team formulated a set of recommendations for the Chisinau City Hall and Municipal Council for increasing transparency and optimizing the use of public money, Info-Prim Neo reports. According to a communiqué from the API, the municipal authorities are recommended to work out a strategy for ensuring transparency in the decision-making process by involving the citizens in different stages of this process, to review the content of the official website www.chisinau.md and publish comprehensible information about the budget, regular reports on the fulfillment of the budget and detailed reports on the use of the reserve fund. The monitoring team worked within a project to selectively check the transparency of the public budgets in Chisinau and Balti. The examination was performed by joint groups consisting of journalists, representatives of public associations and ordinary people. The project formed part of the media campaign “Public Money should be Accounted for! During nine months, the monitoring team followed and assessed the level of transparency in using public finances by the municipal authorities, how the residents were informed about the process of designing and fulfilling the local budget and how they were involved in this process. They also checked the correctness of the public tender contests held. The team pointed to improvements in ensuring institutional transparency, but established that there was no strategic approach to ensuring transparency in the budgetary process and the use of public money in the municipality of Chisinau, including the existence of systemic problems in organizing and holding public tender contests. The experts suggested creating web pages or sub-pages for all the general divisions of the Chisinau Municipal Council and adjusting the content of the existing websites to the requirements concerning ensuring of transparency. The campaign ”Public Money should be Accounted for!” continues this year with other activities aimed at supervising the promotion of transparency in decision making by encouraging the people’s participation in solving community problems and monitoring the use of public money at local level. The project “Monitoring the Use of Public Money in Chisinau and Balti” was implemented by the Association of Independent Press with the financial support of the Good Governance Program of Soros Foundation Moldova.