Enhancing Integrity and Effectiveness of Illegal Asset Confiscation - European Approaches
Prevention and eradication of corruption is a responsibility of all governmental institutions, as well as groups outside the public sector, such as civil society, non-governmental organizations, and community-based organizations. Within the Illicit Asset Confiscation Project, the tree chapters in Bulgaria, Romania and Italy will implement civil monitoring over Asset Recovery Offices in their countries in terms of transparency, integrity, accountability and access to information.
Transparency is about shedding light on rules, plans, processes and actions. It is known why, how, what, and how much. Transparency ensures that public officials, civil servants, managers, board members and businessmen act visibly and understandably, and report on their activities. And it means that the general public can hold them to account. It is the surest way of guarding against corruption, and helps increase trust in the people and institutions on which our futures depend.
Accountability means ensuring that officials in public, private and voluntary sector organizations are answerable for their actions and that there is redress when duties and commitments are not met. Accountability is an institutionalized (i.e. regular, established, accepted) relationship between different actors. One set of people/organizations are held to account (“accountees”), and another set do the holding (“accounters”).
Access to information. As a principle, public officials, civil servants, managers and directors of companies and organizations and board trustees have a duty to act visibly, predictably and understandably to promote participation and accountability. Information should be presented in plain and readily comprehensible language and formats appropriate for different stakeholders. It should retain the detail and disaggregation necessary for analysis, evaluation and participation. Information should be made available in ways appropriate to different audiences. It should be made available in sufficient time to permit analysis, evaluation and engagement by relevant stakeholders. This means that information needs to be provided while planning as well as during and after the implementation of policies and programs. Information should be managed so that it is up-to-date, accurate, and complete.
The concept of Integrity involves the behaviours and actions consistent with a set of moral or ethical principles and standards, embraced by individuals as well as institutions that create a barrier to corruption. Integrity is an attribute of the overall performance of the system of checks and balances to control corruption. More specifically, integrity enforcement is about the existence of rules that aim to prevent corruption (e.g. codes of conduct, ethical codes, and integrity pacts) in relationships between the actors involved in service delivery.