ANTI-CORRUPTION BEST PRACTICES IN SELECTED EU COUNTRIES

1.Bulgaria: Most of the positive policy measures on tackling corruption in Bulgaria aim at improving the overall level of transparency, and examples of such practices come from different fields. The principle of the overriding public interest is enshrined in the Access to Public Information Act, which opened the door to investigative journalism; some modest steps have already been made in this direction. Since even the electoral process itself raises legality and corruption concerns, measures have been taken to increase its transparency and limit some types of corruption related to it. A complete ban on undisclosed and corporate donations and a ceiling of approximately €5 000 worth of donations a year to political parties are prescribed by law. Over 7 000 high-level officials holding different posts, including MPs, have to declare their assets in an electronic public register held at the National Audit Office. The 2014-2020 e-Governance development strategy aims, among other things, at increasing the overall level of transparency and efficiency of public institutions, enhancing citizen and civil-society participation in governance, and delivering accessible administrative services of sound quality to both citizens and businesses. With regard to public institutions, these measures include ensuring transparency in their decision- making and opportunities for public feedback; monitoring progress in the implementation of priority services and projects on a continuous basis; ensuring better interaction among institutions in the public administration; and ensuring that personal data are handled lawfully. The 2016-2020 Road map for implementing the strategy includes more specific measures, among them building centralised automated information systems in sectors such as the customs, the judiciary and national security. These information systems would be capable of analysing the risk of corruption facing officials by providing references to numerous specific pieces of legislation and collating information from multiple sources and registers. Similar automated information systems would be introduced for the purposes of annual financial reporting, the cadastre, public procurement, and e-voting. Most of these projects are in their preliminary or early stage and their full impact on the fight against corruption is to be seen in the future. For example, the e-procurement system still has limited functionalities –while the open-data Public Procurement Register does bring transparency to public contracts, the tendering process is not yet sufficiently transparent. Another initiative on fighting corruption involves introducing TI integrity pacts in public procurement. The 2012-2014 pilot phase was implemented for a number of tenders launched by the Road Infrastructure Agency, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy. TI also implements a national integrity system assessment, which analyses holistically efforts to prevent and fight corruption in the legislative, executive and judicial branches of power, the institution of the ombudsman, civil society organisations, the media and the business sector. Civil society pressure for transparency is an effort to offset the lack of media freedom, at least partially. The latest such initiative is the setting up of the Anti-Corruption Fund, which investigates corruption and analyses it based on case, type and reason, and organises trainings on activities aimed at curbing corruption. The Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD), which has a long record of doing research on corruption in Bulgaria, has developed a comprehensive model for monitoring anti-corruption government policies. Despite the underfunding of municipalities and the financial vulnerability of municipal councillors, there are positive examples of anti-corruption measures at the local level. Such examples are: the transparent decision-making process in the Municipality of Veliko Tarnovo regarding requests for funding from the government budget; and the posting of councillors' questions and mayors' answers on the municipal websites in Burgas, Gabrovo and Silistra. Other examples include intensified interaction with civil society (for instance, in the municipalities of Blagoevgrad, Gabrovo, Rousse, Razgrad, Pleven, Smolyan, Shumen, Stara Zagora and Sofia), public participation in the sittings of the municipal councils and their committees (Pazardzhik), as well as real-time posting of the administration's document flow on the municipal website (Burgas).

2.Croatia: Examples of good practices in combatting corruption in Croatia are either scant or not given sufficient visibility. This is in line with the strong public perception that Croatia's fight against corruption is not so effective and with the Commission's remarks that the proposed measures to combat aspects of corruption are not sufficiently defined, and that the control mechanisms for their implementation are flawed. Actions taken by the public administration –in particular the regional and the local one –are few and far apart, and it is mostly civil society organisations that have made concrete steps and designed projects aimed at eradicating corruption at all levels, especially at the regional and local ones. Public administration reform is a key issue that has been facing Croatia for years and that the Commission has identified as a prerequisite for an efficient delivery of public services. The Commission evaluates Croatia's public administration as 'weak', 'inefficient' and 'fragmented', and points out that 'Croatia scores much lower than other EU members on the government's capacity to deliver sound policies ('executive capacity')'. It furthermore states that 'the lack of evidence-based policymaking and monitoring of policy impact affects most areas, and the perceived quality of public services in Croatia is also predominantly bad'. It also raises the issue of Croatia's high level of territorial fragmentation, which 'contributes to a complex state administration and weighs on efficiency', especially because 'many units do not have the adequate financial, administrative, and personnel resources'. In some cases, civil society organisations report that their efforts to make the local administration's work more transparent are not always welcomed. Such an example is the project involving the introduction of participative budgeting in several Croatian towns, which had partial success. Another project involving the town of Pazin enjoyed greater success. Pazin has been implementing participative budgeting since the launch of its project in 2014. The project, co-financed by the EU at 85 %, was implemented by the NGO Gong in partnership with the local government and several other organisations.

Its aim was to strengthen the capacity of all stakeholders, especially the citizens, in making local-level decisions, as a way to increase the quality of public policies and governance practices of the local administration. The citizens were involved in drawing up the local budget through public discussions, where they made suggestions, debated and voted on the communal actions that were to receive financing. They had also been informed on the local government's sectoral priorities through five focussed discussions. Minutes on the public discussions, suggestions and decisions were delivered to the town council and the mayor, so that when adopting the budget they would take into account the citizens' proposals. There is a web portal where citizens can inform themselves about how they can contribute to the making of the local budget. At the national level, there have been more prominent examples of actions, focused in particular on making public procurement procedures –a highly problematic area –as transparent as possible. One such example is the State Commission for Monitoring Public Procurement Procedures (DKOM), which was set up as an independent government body in charge of deciding on appeals on public procurement procedures, concessions and public-private partnerships. It publishes all of its decisions on its website. Furthermore, all public bodies have to publish their procurement plans for the fiscal year as well as the contracts they have concluded, on their own websites or on the public procurement portal coordinated by the Ministry of the Economy. Yet another example is a civil society project run by the Partnership for Social Development NGO, involving the launch of a web portal and an EU-funded public procurement database. The portal gives citizens free access to data on the implementation of public procurement procedures and on the companies involved in such procedures. It also provides information on the assets and interests of public officials.

3. Finland: Precisely because corruption is not perceived as a pervasive problem in Finland, Finnish authorities have not produced many innovative or noteworthy initiatives in the field. Finland's reputable public administration, characterised by a strong public-service ethic and belief in the rule of law, is seen as an international example of best practice in and of itself. Although a national strategy is being finalised for the first time, it focuses on legal, institutional and policy changes –including those recommended by international observers –that the country has yet to implement, rather than on pilot projects or experimental initiatives. The draft strategy identifies stronger administrative cooperation to prevent corruption; awareness raising; greater transparency; stronger protection for whistle-blowers; enhanced anti-bribery legislation; and more research into corruption as areas requiring work. The draft strategy does not go into specifics on how these are to be achieved, however. In addition to the national anti-corruption strategy now being finalised, Finland has an Internal security programme agreed in 2012, which partly deals with the problem of Finnish businesses engaging in corrupt activities when operating in foreign markets. In addition, in 2002 the Finnish Ministry of Justice set up an anti-corruption network to discuss necessary policy changes and share information. Both the Finnish Tax Administration ('Vero') and the Ministry of Finance have produced guidelines for officials on how to report criminal offences and on their obligations concerning hospitality, benefits and gifts. The National Bureau of Investigation's economic crime and corruption unit consists of only one officer. On 12 April 2016, the Finnish government's Ministerial Committee on Economic Policy adopted a national strategy for tackling the grey economy and economic crime for the 2016–2020 period. In line with this strategy, the Ministry of the Interior's Steering Group for the Prevention of Economic Crime has drawn up an action plan setting out objectives and measures to put the strategy into effect. The strategy's broader aim is 'to ensure corruption-free business and a level playing field for all companies'. The strategic objectives are:

·to promote healthy competition between companies;

·to remove the conditions enabling the shadow economy and economic crime; ·to increase the effectiveness of action taken by the authorities to tackle the shadow economy and economic crime by improving cooperation among them; and

·to strengthen the fight against crimes related to the shadow economy.

Further, the action plan consists of four key projects to be undertaken by the authorities:

1. Ensuring well-functioning markets and healthy competition by improving opportunities for companies and citizens to act honestly, reducing the administrative burden and enhancing anti-corruption action;

2. Intervening proactively in phenomena associated with the shadow economy and economic crime, and taking action to influence people's attitudes;

3. Improving the information-exchange between the authorities;

4. Enhancing the effectiveness of the fight against crime related to the shadow economy and further developing administrative sanctions.

The action plan will be assessed by the Ministry of the Interior Steering Group at six- monthly intervals, with the relevant ministries and authorities responsible for each measure reporting on progress in implementing the plan and on the project results.

4. France: In recent years, France has undertaken numerous initiatives seeking innovative solutions to corruption prevention. France participates actively in a number of international initiatives, such as the Open Government Partnership and the Open Data Charter . Opening public data and making it freely available for reuse by civil society is widely considered as a promising move for increasing the transparency and integrity of public officials. France has an ambitious open data strategy and makes thousands of datasets available on a national platform, data.gouv.fr, in reusable format. Under the heading 'transparency of public life', citizens can find data on political parties' annual accounts, on declarations of assets of ministers and declarations of interests of elected representatives, and on the work of the Senate and the National Assembly. The portal also publishes data on public procurement contracts extracted from the Official bulletin of public contract declarations (BOAMP) and on public expenses of local and regional authorities made available by the General Directorate for public finances (DGFIP).

An interesting example of how civil society reuses open data made available by the public administration is the interactive online platform, created by Transparency International (TI) France. This platform gives access to two databases: the first one allows to see the interests and income of members of parliament, based on their declarations of interest published by the High Authority for Transparency in Public Life ( HATVP). The second database contains information on lobbyists registered on the voluntary National Assembly register: their number, sector and lobbying expenses. Another TI France initiative is the interactive map of corruption cases in France, created with the help of volunteers and open for contribution to all citizens. As there is no central public database of court rulings, the map is based on local press articles. The underlying dataset is now made available on the data.gouv.fr platform. Public procurement data are increasingly made available at regional and local levels. In 2015, the Breizh Small Business Act –a public-private partnership association from the region of Bretagne–launched a regional observatory of public procurement and has since 2014 been proposing to all public and private entities to sign a 'public procurement charter'. The first principle of this charter is to increase transparency, by encouraging procurement authorities to publish all public procurement contracts, regardless of their value, as well as the annual budgetary provisions. Another such example is the Paris Municipality, which introduced in 2014 an open data clause to local public procurement contracts: an obligation to publish the data produced while executing the awarded contract. All public procurement contracts above €20 000 are published on the Paris Data portal, along with information on subsidies, the budget voted and its execution. Another way the Paris Municipality embraces transparency is through participative budgeting. Since 2001, Parisians can propose investment projects for their city and vote on the ones that will get funded by the municipal budget. For the 2014-2020 period, Paris is allocating 5 % of its investment budget to projects proposed and selected by citizens. Prevention at regional level also takes on the form of creating internal mechanisms for awareness-raising and for counselling of the relevant stakeholders. Examples include the regions of Ile-de-France, Bretagne and Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur, but also the Strasbourg Municipality, which have all set up specific structures in charge of drafting rules of ethics or codes of conduct, or of collecting declarations of interests and assets before transmitting them to the HATPV.

5. Germany: The German Bundesländer have a fairly large capacity of self-rule. Below are some of the best practices and recent policy measures at the local and regional levels. The German Association of Towns and Municipalities, together with the Federal Association of Small and Medium-Sized Building Contractors, have agreed on the guidelines for the prevention of corruption in public procurement at the local level. As a result, a brochure has been drafted, providing an overview of the preventive measures against corruption in public procurement at the level of towns and municipalities. These preventive measures include: implementing awareness-raising steps and adopting codes of conduct; practising staff rotation; strictly observing the 'four eyes' rules; drafting clear regulations on sponsoring and on the prohibition regarding the acceptance of gifts; establishing centralised authorities for organising/awarding tenders; providing a precise description of tenders and ensuring control of the estimates; organising tender procedures, including secrecy of bids and prevention of a subsequent manipulation of the bids; making increased use of e-procurement; drafting documentation on adjudication and careful control by supervisory bodies; excluding enterprises found guilty of corruption offences from tenders; and drawing up black lists/corruption registers. In the sphere of public procurement, there are other best practices worth mentioning. Germany has specialised courts (at the federal and Bundesländer levels) that only deal with public procurement disputes. Decisions as well as review procedures are carried out efficiently. Another practice includes the pre-qualification of economic operators, which enables companies to submit their documents for participation in a tender procedure to the Procurement Advisory Office. These are screened and, if approved, the companies get a certificate (with a unique registration number in a Germany-wide database) to confirm that they meet all of the necessary criteria and that they now have pre-qualified status. To submit a bid, a pre-qualified company only needs to present a copy of its certificate and the certification number. The Business Keeper Monitoring System (BKMS) aims at ensuring better protection of whistle-blowers by making insider knowledge available in the fight against corruption. It is a web-based software for structured processing of anonymous tip-offs. Whistle- blowers are always faced with a risk when reporting a corruption incident, involving, for example, possible pressure by their employer or physical threat. The main advantage of the BKMS is that it allows communication to take place anonymously. Through this internet-based system, an employee/member of an organisation can report a corruption incident 24/7. Every report is individually encrypted content- and channel-wise; it can only be decrypted by the receiver of the message. No one else, including other members of the BKMS, has access to the decrypted messages. The external BKMS server is located in a high-security centre, which banks, such as the European Central Bank, use for protecting their data and servers. The BKMS was originally developed for the private sector. Recently, it has been extensively employed by the state authorities, such as the police in North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg. The BKMS is becoming increasingly valuable by helping whistle-blowers to avoid negative personal consequences, given also that the legislation offers them little protection. Certain initiatives of the Bundesländer that help to ensure transparency as a way to reinforce public control over the regional/local administration also need to be given due credit. For example, according to Transparency International Deutschland, all Bundesländer, except for Hessen, Lower Saxony and Saxony have adopted their own information or transparency acts. These acts, in principle, make it easier for the public to obtain (bureaucracy-related) information. In Bavaria, for example, the Act on Electronic Administration in Bavaria (e-government act) among others enshrines the 'right to obtaining information'.µ

6. Italy: Italy has carried out a number of projects to raise corruption-related awareness or to boost the fight against corruption. Some of them have addressed the problematic area of public procurement. Project CAPACI was one such initiative aimed at improving the protection of public contracts and transparency. It provided means for monitoring financial flows occurring among the chain of players participating in the creation of public infrastructure and thus being beneficiaries of payments sourced from public funds. Project CAPACI received financial support from the European Commission and sought to create a database featuring information on individual transactions and payment status reports by using Single Euro-Payment Area (SEPA) standards. Furthermore, its goal was to introduce a system of alerts/warning signals that would report unusual behaviour, as well as to facilitate the dissemination in other countries of the best practices and technologies promoted under the project. Today, following the test phase and the publication of Decree-Law 90/2014, monitoring is compulsory for works related to strategic infrastructure. Project Itaca, a federative association of regional and autonomous provinces, is a valuable network aiming at developing and promoting transparency in the various phases of public procurement and public concessions. The project also seeks to disseminate best practices in services, supplies and public works with the aim of achieving sustainability of the urban environment. There are also projects of a more general scope that deal with the prevention of corruption. For instance, the Anti-corruption project is an initiative aimed at providing technical and scientific assistance to the Department of Public Administration for designing corporate models to help prevent corruption, enhance the awareness of corruption among the public administration and promote a culture of legality. The Public administration reforms project focused on the eight southern Italian regions, is aimed at enhancing the strategic competencies of managers in the public administration in terms of preventing and tackling corruption. The role played by the National Anti-Corruption Authority (ANAC) is also worth mentioning, as it maintains contacts with Italian universities to deliver trainings and promote a culture of legality. In this regard, it collaborates with the Italian School of Public Administration for the purpose of putting together staff trainings on topics focused on prevention of corruption, transparency and public contracts.

7. Romania: Romania has been given international credit for some of its best practices and innovative approaches to fighting corruption. The OECD report on Prevention of Corruption (2015) emphasises the thematic monitoring missions in public institutions, established by the 2012-2015 National Anti-Corruption Strategy ( NAS), and consisting of evaluation visits by teams of experts. During the four years while this NAS was in force, 17 central public institutions and 66 local administration entities were assessed. Moreover, emphasis was laid on assessing the level of 'institutional responsiveness', that is, assessing the improvements made by the institutions where violations of the integrity rules had been detected. Another best practice concerns corruption risk assessment, with public institutions being responsible for assessing their own corruption risks and vulnerabilities and developing internal integrity plans. In particular, the Ministry of Internal Affairs has developed a methodology for managing corruption risks within its structures, which has been replicated by several other ministries. In public procurement, the new system for ex-ante checks (the PREVENT electronic system established by Law 184/2016) was welcomed by the European Commission, among others. It automatically detects potential situations of conflicts of interest before the selection and award procedures have been launched and is based on the compulsory completion of an integrity form by the contract authorities. Failure to complete the form leads to suspension of the procedure. Also, if the system detects any potential conflict of interests, it notifies the contracting authority before the awarding of the contract. Specifically regarding the local and regional levels, the 2016-2020 NAS mentions a number of best practices that have been identified: adoption of codes of ethics and conduct specialised in public procurement and EU funds; implementation of online e- governance procedures; delivery of trainings on best anti-corruption practices; and creation of registers describing integrity incidents and abstentions from decisions in situations of conflicts of interest. However, it also highlights some outstanding problems: a formal approach to the prevention of corruption at the local level; a limited number of territorial units and institutions having a code of ethics; a formal role exercised by the ethics advisors within those institutions; lack of knowledge about the legislation on receiving gifts, on post-employment restrictions and on whistle-blowing; lack of procedures for preventing conflicts of interest and incompatibilities, and so forth. In this context, the MDRAP launched the creation of a map of best anti-corruption practices at local and regional level and will develop, together with the Justice Ministry, a methodology for the implementation of the 2016-2020 NAS at the local level. Civil society groups have also set up projects to monitor corruption (statistics on convictions and sentences in corruption cases), transparency in decision-making, political clientelism, and compliance with the law on access to public information.

8.. United Kingdom: In October 2014, the Home Office (UK Ministry of the Interior) started a series of pilots in seven areas bringing together the information and powers of local authorities and their police counterparts to understand the organised crime threat to public-sector procurement. The pilots compared local-authority procurement data against law- enforcement organised crime (OC) information in order to identify whether there were organised crime links to local authority suppliers. A small number of links were found that highlighted supplier sectors more likely to be vulnerable to OC. Where links were found, the local authority and police worked jointly to ensure the links are disrupted. Areas responded positively to the pilots, introducing broader measures to reduce their vulnerability in the future, for example by: reviewing and strengthening procurement procedures; working more closely with police; making better use of data to check procurement contracts where there is greater vulnerability; and bolstering the disruption focus of local serious and organised crime multi-agency partnerships. Central government agreed it would produce and circulate to local authorities and police forces a summary of the pilot work including lessons learned and good practice to reduce vulnerability for local authorities and encourage police force areas to use nationally. Another data-driven example is listed in the Local Government Counter-Fraud and Corruption Strategy (discussed earlier) on the use of data matching. UK local authoritieshave funded periodic data-matching exercises (the National Fraud Initiative) for some years. Councils are now building on this by utilising improved data analytics and richer data sources from the shift to online contact with customers. A case study on Birmingham City Council highlights the use of its data store (expanded to include data from neighbouring councils and other partners) to catch and prevent fraud through data- matching and data-mining. It also uses the data to enable validation of information on application forms, for instance to help ensure that housing tenancies are being awarded only to those in genuine need. Such approaches can help to make corrupt practices more difficult to carry out and help expose ongoing corrupt practices when suspicious patterns are highlighted. Working with central government, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) developed a new counter-fraud Centre of Excellence (the CIPFA Counter Fraud Centre (CCFC)). This was set up in July 2014 and provides tools and services to the public sector and in particular to local authorities to tackle fraud and corruption. An alert was issued in September 2015 by the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) on bribery risks faced by local government. In collaboration with CIPFA, this alert was disseminated to UK authorities via the National Anti-Fraud Network. It was published to encourage the reporting of corrupt activities and to reinforce awareness among local- authority managers of potential council vulnerabilities under Section 7 of the Bribery Act 2010 (which created an offence of failing to prevent bribery). To incentivise and support whistle-blowersin cases of bribery and corruption, UK central government departments are working together to develop a serious and organised crime audit framework. This will include a whistle-blowing section, to help local authorities review existing arrangements and identify where improvements can be made. This builds on various sorts of guidance on appropriate whistle-blowing arrangements, including a 2008 code of practice from the British Standards Institute, updated in 2013 by the Whistle-blowing Commission set up by Public Concern at Work. This was further augmented by a 2015 UK central government-produced guide and code of practice aimed at helping employers understand the law and how to ensure appropriate whistleblowing arrangements are in place. The UK's Home Office has written to a range of industry bodies, including local authorities and professionals such as solicitors, accountants and banking organisations, encouraging the use of the extensive practical guidance produced by the Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure (CPNI) on managing the threat from corrupt 'insiders'.

Highest Corruption Perception (Score below 60 on the TI Corruption Perception Index 2016)

1. Bulgaria
2. Greece
3. Italy
4. Romania
5. Hungary
6. Croatia
7. Slovakia
8. Malta
9. Czech Republic
10. Cyprus
11. Latvia
12. Spain
13. Lithuania