Abstract
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Integrity, transparency and accountability in public administration are priorities for the Romanian public administration, which is in the process of implementation and strengthening of ethical standards and also of legal and administrative instruments, to ensure the integrity of public administration.
Within the area of civil service there weren’t defined any direct attributions regarding the prevention, detection and combating corruption within the public administration; however, the National Agency of Civil Servants through the activities carried out, plays an active role in order to prevent corruption.
Considering the important role of ethics in the public administration reform process, in 2005 NACS developed a medium term strategy on ethics in public services taking into consideration the simplification of the administrative procedures, eliminating overlapping and redundant procedures, using new information technologies to increase transparency of public services, increasing the transparency of administrative procedures, training the personnel, monitoring and checking the compliance with the rules of conduct and ethics, raising the efficiency of internal control measures, and also disseminating the examples of good practices.
In this process of developing and implementing the mechanisms and procedures to ensure transparency and accountability in the civil service, the compliance with the rules of conduct was to be measured and monitored by persons occupying a civil service position and the activity carried out by the ethical councilors are key factors.
The target group for the planned actions includes civil servants with attributions in the ethical counseling field, from public institutions and authorities from central and local level and other civil servants, who could support the dissemination ethical concept within public services.
First, NACS started by establishing and training of a civil servants pilot group with responsibilities within the ethical field in order to further train a number of experts able to ensure the implementation of the Code of Conduct for public servants. Then, for the correct enforcement of this Code, we elaborated a Manual of procedures for implementing the Code of Conduct, which represents a practical guide for the implementation of specific legislation, and also a fundamental document for training the ethical counselors, an innovative feature of the project. An ethical counselor is a civil servant, usually from the human resources department, who offers ethical guidance to other civil servants and monitors the compliance with the ethical rules of conduct.
To further improve the activity of the ethical counselors, NACS elaborated a study in order to identify the role of civil servants responsible for ethical counseling within the public authorities and institutions, the way to perform their duties established by the Code of Conduct, the difficulties in ethical counseling process, the proposals to improve the activity for better enforcement of the Code of Conduct. Also, to expand the ethical counselors’ network, we proceeded to analyze training needs of the ethical councilors in order to organize training sessions addressed to civil servants with ethical counseling responsibilities.
One of the main results of this project is the establishment of a functional ethical counselors’ network in Romania of around 1000 ethical counselors. The network (and database) helps ethical counselors to keep in touch, to exchange ideas, and allows the Agency to transmit ideas in a non-formal, friendlier way.
More than 300 ethical counselors were trained they and currently have working procedures, standardized job description and training curricula.
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