Failure to enforce the recommendations of the corruption expertise when drafting legislative and normative acts has deprived the public budget of about 2.5 billion MDL

October 12, 2021

Due to the failure to apply the corruption expertise procedure and recommendations, the draft legislative and normative acts approved during 2019-2020 have deprived the national public budget of about 2.5 billion MDL. This is the conclusion of the authors of the “Corruption Expertise during 2019-2020: Efficiency, costs, impact” study, developed with support of UNDP Moldova.

The authors of the study have analyzed how the state authorities have applied the provisions related to corruption expertise – a corruption prevention tool, which assesses to what extent the content of the draft legislative and normative acts meets the national and international anticorruption standards. At the same time, this exercise is used by the National Anticorruption Centre (NAC) to identify the provisions which favor or may favor corruption and to develop recommendations to exclude or diminish their effects.

The NAC conducted corruption expertise for 1448 draft normative acts, out of which 768 were draft Government Decisions, 577 draft laws and 103 department acts, developed during 2019-2020. Many of them have been adopted without anticorruption expertise or have ignored the recommendations provided by the National Anticorruption Center to exclude the provisions that might generate corruption. The authors of the study estimated that the value of avoided derivation for the National Public Budget by rejected or withdrawn projects exceeded 1.5 billion MDL, and the total value of costs for adopted drafts accounted for 2.5 billion MDL.

The experts emphasized that the main corruption risks detected in draft laws were abuse of office, excessive power, conflict of interest, favoritism, passive corruption, active corruption, exerting undue influence, and influence peddling. These risks prevailed mainly in the normative acts from such areas as “Economy and trade”, “Budget and finance”, as well as “Education, culture, cults and mass-media”.

The authors have also established that the number of Governmental normative acts which have avoided the corruption expertise increased in 2019, reaching a share of 30% in 2020. The number of drafts with “fiscal evasion” and “swindling” risks has tripled in 2020.

The “Corruption Expertise during 2019-2020: efficiency, costs, impact” study was conducted in the framework of the “Curbing corruption and building sustainable integrity in the Republic of Moldova” project, implemented by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Moldova, with the support of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With UNDP support., the efficiency of anticorruption for the periods 2010-2015 and 2016-2018 was assessed.