On May 11, the Anti-Corruption Agency organized another two-day workshop to improve the skills of more than 70 employees of government bodies and organizations responsible for ensuring openness.

For reference: in 2022, the Agency organized 10 workshops aimed at training employees responsible for ensuring openness in government bodies, in which more than 200 civil servants participated. This workshop is a logical continuation of these events.

This year the Anti-Corruption Agency has published the Openness Index for the first time, which is provided for by the Decree of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan dated June 14, 2022 No. DP154 ‘On measures to introduce a system to increase and assess the level of openness of the activities of government bodies and organizations’.

The rating assessed the efficiency and effectiveness of the work of 86 government bodies and organizations in the field of ensuring openness on the basis of 8 indicators covering 84 criteria.

For the purpose of comprehensive and high-quality organization of assessment processes, over the past period, the Agency has provided regular methodological and practical assistance to government bodies, contributing to the organization of openness activities at a high level.

Also, for to ensure the impartiality and transparency of the assessment processes, the Decree established the Commission for Assessment of Efficiency and Effectiveness of the Work in Ensuring Openness (the Assessment Commission).

For reference: The Assessment Commission is a collegiate body that makes the final decision on the calculation of the Openness Index based on the results of monitoring and assessing the openness of the activities of government bodies and organizations, formed by a coordinating body composed of highly qualified specialists and experts of several government agencies and organizations.

According to the final results, 15 government bodies were included in ‘green’ category (scoring 71-100 points), 44 organizations placed in ‘yellow’ category (scoring 55-71 points) and 27 government bodies with indicators below 55 points fell into ‘red’ category.

At the workshop, the main attention was paid to the publication of the positive experience of government bodies and organizations in the field of ensuring openness based on the results of the Openness Index, as well as systemic deficiencies in ensuring openness analyzed for to be eliminated in the future work.

Participants were provided with detailed information on issues related to compliance with the requirements of the legislation on openness, timeliness, correctness and completeness of information disclosure on the Index’s assessment indicators.

In particular, the effectiveness of the activities of employees responsible for ensuring openness in government bodies and organizations, the state of posting information on the official websites of government bodies and organizations, the provision of electronic public services, the publication of socially significant information in the designated resources, as well as accountability to society.

The Agency’s specialists provided the necessary recommendations to the participants of the workshop on improving the efficiency of work in the field of ensuring openness, as well as increasing the efficiency of the Public Council.

During the workshop, issues related to ensuring the openness of the budget process by posting data on the official website, posting information on the Open Data Portal, introducing mass communication technologies, using the principles of openness in early detection and prevention of corruption were discussed.

 

Press Office

The Anti-Corruption Agency

12 May, 2023