While Slovakia has a standard legal framework to support integrity, implementation is lacking. The Police Force, Judiciary, President, and Public Procurement Office have scored the lowest and are thus considered to be the weakest institutions in Slovakia. The results are based on the National Integrity System (NIS), a study of integrity and anti-corruption programs, conducted by Transparency International in 25 European countries over the last year. In Slovakia, researchers from the Slovak Governance Institute carried out the national study for Transparency International Slovakia with a focus on the quality of legislation and its implementation in practice. The study looks at the period from March 2009 to September 2011. Read the rest of this entry »

Eight political subjects- KDH, Most-Híd, OĽaNO, SaS, SDKÚ-DS, SMK, 99% and Smer-SD – have signed the commitment to enforce stricter rules for financing of the parties’ activities in one year from forming the new parliament in case they are elected. Smer- SD commented on the initiative positively but had delivered the signed commitment electronically only after the press conference on the evening of 15^th Feb. 2012. The number of parties who have signed the commitment thus grew from seven to eight. HZDS and SNS have not expressed their views on the initiative prepared by Transparency International Slovakia, Institute for Economic and Social Reforms, and Slovak Governance Institute. Read the rest of this entry »

The best law in fighting corruption passed by Radičová’s government is the amendment to the act on judges and assessors that brought publishing of the courts’ decisions online, public selection procedures for judges, and more detailed financial disclosure statements for judges. It follows from the ranking of Transparency International Slovakia that invited 13 experts to assess twenty anti-corruption laws brought before the parliament in this term. Read the rest of this entry »

Three non-governmental organizations offer the political parties a possibility of electoral public promise

Transparency International Slovakia, Institute for Economic and Social Reforms (INEKO), and Slovak Governance Institute sent letters containing the request for public commitment to the representatives of the major political parties to see whether are they willing to introduce the legislation proposals that would impose the stricter control over the financing of politicians during their prospective presence in parliament. Among the seven presented commitments are also: the establishment of the independent institution for control over financing, to tie the part of the state contributions for the political parties to the declared private donations, and stricter assets declarations.
These three NGOs will publish the decisions of the parties to commit to this public promise and to declare that they will propose the concerned legislation within a year from signing under this commitment on the 15th of February.

This initiative is aiming to support the solutions limiting the space for corrupt or hidden financing of political parties.

You can look at the whole letter and the form of public promise with seven particular commitments (available only in Slovak).

Number of tenders with more than five competitors has doubled in the past two years

The companies were competing more in the last year and this way the state saved up more than in the previous years. Number of purchases with a single applicant dropped from 47% to 38% of all tenders. On the other hand, the number of tenders with more than five applicants grew from one tenth to one fifth of all public procurement. Average savings towards the expected costs were in the past year on the level of 14%, while in 2009 it was only 5%. This follows from the analysis of quality of public procurement in years 2009-2011 prepared by Transparency International Slovakia.

While in 2009 the average number of companies in a tender was 2,3, in 2011 this number grew to 3,6. Higher participation of the companies in tenders affects positively the quality and profitability of the offers. This way Slovakia cut to half the previous lag behind the other EU countries where the average number of companies competing in one tender is five.
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Transparency SK has just launched Open Public Procurement – procurement data reporting/procurement site – http://tender.sme.sk/en/.

The site collects information on 30+k contracts since 2005 worth almost 22 billion euros. Essentially a business intelligence application, the site provides both detailed and aggregated information on procurers, vendors and business sectors. Using the application, users, be they anticorruption watchdogs, businesses or government agencies, can easily analyze competitiveness or market concentration.

Application in bilingual (Slovak, English), provides data exports and could be easily tweaked for other EU countries due to similar legislation. If you are interested in the code, please get in touch.

Open Contracts Portal had been kindly supported by our partners Open Society Foundations, the Embassy of the United States in Slovakia and Siemens Integrity Initiative.

Transparency International Slovakia and Fair-Play Alliance have launched a new internet portal (Google Translate version) aiming to provide easier access to thousands of contracts administered by the state. Journalists, researchers and members of public can now easily browse through the piles of digitalized and tidied contracts.
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On 22.9.2011 TIS held a workshop named National Integrity System of Slovakia. High calibre parcipants included representatives of public prosecution, the third sector, Anti-monopoly Office, Supreme Audit Office, the Ombudsman, members of parliament, foreign embassys, and other eminent Slovak stakeholders and representatives of the public and private sector. The purpose of the workshop was to receive feedback and reactions to the still working document Assessment report of the national integrity system of Slovakia which is due to be publicly distributed and presented in late November 2011. The second half of the meeting was spent finding concrete solutions and recommendations on how to improve the current state of the national integrity system.

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Application visualizes more than 33 thousand grants from 2004 to 2010 worth more than 350 million euro.

Ministries of Education and Culture spend yearly roughly 60 million euro on sports and culture grants, a sum approximately equal to budget of town of Presov with 90 thousand citizen. Despite this significant sum of money, ministries provide inadequate information on grants’ spending. It is virtually impossible to find out how many grants had been provided due to lack of a unified state grants database.

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• The coalition has started to reform the judiciary and has introduced mandatory publication of all government contracts.
• In procurement, the current government uses more competitive and transparent procedures than the previous one.
• In the Parliament, the members who most actively voted for more transparency were Miroslav Beblavy (SDKU-DS) and KDH members, while the least active were Smer-SD deputies.
• The main unsolved problems that remain are too many political nominations in the state administration, as well as the need for a reduction of immunity and tighter control of conflicts of interest, financial statements, and campaign financing.

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The nothern Slovak city of Martin was given the prestigious UN Public  Service Award for its anticorruption reforms supplied by the Slovak  chapter of Transparency International. The project raised the  transparency of public procurement through introduction of electronic  auctions, by mandatory online publication of spending documents or by  introduction of ethics commissioner. It is the first time that a Slovak  institution was awarded such a prize. TI Slovakia is currently working on similar anticorruption audits in  cities of Prievidza, Banska Bystrica and Bratislava-Ruzinov.

TIS representatives, Ivan Rončák and Vladimír Pirošík, held the first meeting with Peter Laťák – new mayor of Babín (village situated in the Námestovo district) on 30 March 2011. Mr Laťák strives to implement anti-corruption and pro-transparency measures in the village. He took an inspiration from the town of Martin which had successfully implemented such measures on a town scale in 2009. Mr Laťák hopes that the measures will deliver more effective use and saving of public resources, greater participation of local citizens, and also less space for corrupion.

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TIS  organised 2 seminars (Babín – 30.3. & Beladice – 6.4.2011) during which our experts (Ivan Rončák, Vladimír Pirošík) presented current recommendations, best practices and most effective anti-corruption tools in villages; and shared experience from the process of delivering anti-corruption packages in towns and currently in the village of Babín. Seminars were attended by local decision makers (i.e. mayors, councillors) and civil society activists. Read the rest of this entry »