Description
We want to start public scrutiny of public funds spent on private purposes. The monitoring will cover spending between 01.01.2014 and 31.03.2015, and will concern central government administration offices. We want to control regulations and spending, initiate informational activities and present recommendations. Through analysing legal regulations and internal regulations, we identify legal gaps in institutional mechanism development; through monitoring and analysing selected costs, we diagnose the extent of the phenomenon; based on gathered data, we describe the attitudes of offices towards the phenomenon; as a result of communication activities, we sensitise general public and raise awareness of public institutions; based on results of the project, including a report, we will present recommendations for remedies and improvements. Beneficiaries: citizens and 19 administration offices, and indirectly also watchdog organisations participating in similar projects.
Summary of project results
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.
Summary of bilateral results