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Public or private? Monitoring of public spending

Public scrutiny Completed
mazowieckie
Warszawa
2015-02-03 - 2016-04-30
180 000,00 PLN
162 000,00 PLN
public institutions, public finances, accessing public data
Project description
The project was motivated by the "recordings", "Madrid" and "kilometer" political scandals of 2014 in Poland. They revealed disturbing information on the spending of public funds by the administration and politicians. The aim of the project was to make the public administration realise the problem of their employees' anomy and to initiate changes consisting in the introduction of new legal solutions and good practices, leading to better efficiency, expediency and transparency in official activities. The monitoring covered 19 government offices - all ministries and the Chancellery of the Prime Minister. It was examined what regulations and to what extent protect public interest from spending public resources by political decision-makers and public officers for private purposes: a dozen or more acts of law and regulations were analysed, as well as over 130 internal regulations of the offices. It was also evaluated how public offices protect in practice public interest from abuses through activities such as education and trainings, new technologies and risk management systems, internal auditing and controls and systems of anonymous information. A catalogue of costs exposed to the risk of abuses was developed. Several hundreds of information and data sets on activities of surveyed offices were also gathered. 16 offices participated in consultations, of which 7 key offices declared implementation of developed solutions or introducing legal and organisational changes. Over 80 recommendations were prepared on tightening the system, related mainly to internal regulations and concerning working time, using phones, official cars and equipment of the employer, official travels. The publication "Public or private?" was prepared as a starting point for remedy and preventive activities. It reached 270 representatives of government administration, academic circles and media and non-governmental organisations. The film promoting the project reached over 430 thousand users of Facebook. The direct recipients of the activities were central administration offices. The project opened a new area of public scrutiny. Bottlenecks were also identified in implementing similar projects in the future.
We use the grant for capacity building