"Digitalization of many government services have started about ten years ago, and a few most successful cases nowadays include UN public service award winner projects such as “Georgian Electronic Government Procurement System” by State Procurement Agency of Georgia (2012 UNPSA winner) and “Online Asset Declaration System” by Civil Service Bureau (2013 UNPSA winner)".
Government of Georgia (GoG) acknowledges importance of Open
Government Initiative (OGI) framework, thus institution and
information technologies are developing with the aspiration of transparency,
accountability and innovation.
Open Government partnership can be considered as a
cornerstone principle and a main supportive element to fight corruption.
According to Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer, “From
being one of the most corrupt countries in Eastern Europe by 2003, now Georgia
has 4% corruption perception among its citizens, only 2% have experienced
bribery and 77% of Georgians are satisfied with government’s actions towards
fighting corruption (Life in Transition Survey, EBRD, 2011).
Efficiency, accountability, transparency outcomes were
achieved under the E-procurement and E-declaration platform, which was
established and developed under the OGI framework. Not only technical support
was provided for the implementation process, legislative framework was absolutely
revised for the OGI and E-service development purposes.
E-procurement
– before 2003 the most corrupted agency was “State Procurement Regulatory
Agency”, thus innovative approach development was the most important agenda for
GoG. Not only corruption elimination was the target, public procurement
efficiency was the second important outcome. Concept of “most corruption
agency” was abandoned when www.procurement.gov.ge
was introduced. Every public procurement activity should be conducted through
online bidding. Web page architecture is constructed in a way where possibility
of corruption is minimal. During the bidding process there isn’t possibility to
see competitor’s information, only bidding information is visual. When
procurement/bidding procedures are completed everybody have opportunity to see
every stage of competition, thus full
transparency, accessibility and equal competition is guaranteed.
E-declaration
– civil servants have obligation to declare information regarding income, property,
assets and etc. Before E-declaration development declaration was organized
through the paper work, and by the management and supervision of the special governmental
body/authority. A lot of drawbacks were on the surface, for instance: over
utilization of resources (human and monetary), weak transparency, poor monitoring
regarding fulfillment, and shortcomings about cross checking opportunities.
Currently E-declaration is fully implemented and public servants are under
public and media attention and with the precise monitoring opportunities.
E-declaration efficiency was proved recently, when former Speaker of Parliament
didn’t declared bank account information precisely and was fined by the
government.
Should be mentioned that implementation process was well organized
and managed. Public servants and interested stakeholders (media, NGO representatives)
have ongoing training opportunities for skills development.
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