Help lines of some public institutions are dead

Some public institutions in Moldova, which are obliged to offer the people the possibility to denounce infringements, have dead or robot help lines. These are the results of a monitoring done by Transparency International Moldova (TI-Moldova), Info-Prim Neo reports. The organization monitored four public institutions in 2011: the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Labor, Social Protection and Family, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies and the State Fiscal Inspectorate. The results were presented at the meeting of the Group for Monitoring the implementation of the National Anticorruption Strategy 2011-2015. According to TI-Moldova experts, public authorities claim they receive 15 petitions by phone per day, but it’s not clear how they do so as no one has answered the hotline calls during the monitoring period. “During the monitoring, we noticed that some institutions don’t appoint persons that would receive people’s complaints. Sometimes, the petitions are forwarded to the persons concerned in the petition, which is an infringement of the legislation”, said Lilia Carasciuc, head of Transparency International Moldova. Ianina Spinei, expert of TI-Moldova, added that many irregularities were found in authorities’ income and interest statements, which are often incomplete. Transparency International Moldova concludes that public authorities have a lot of work to do in terms of receiving and reacting to people’s petitions. It is also recommended that institutions maintain their web pages and publish all information there. Help lines must be functional and with numbers that can be memorized easily. Income and interest statements must be written in time and without infringements by public authorities.