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An anti-bribery management system was implemented with the Permanent Electoral Authority (AEP) through a project intended to "increase transparency, ethics and integrity" with the electoral watchdog.
AEP president Toni Grebla told a press conference on Tuesday that a recurring trend in recent years has seen electoral campaigns getting financing from internal and external sources representing "certain illegitimate interest groups, or which should not have been involved in this process."
According to Grebla, the ongoing project also implies the verification of the way political parties get their financing, and has contributed to increasing the professionalization of most of AEP employees.
The AEP president mentioned that there is also a deeper involvement in the dissemination of information on electoral campaigns and on the way elections are conducted.
"As of December 4, there were 248 political parties registered at the Court, in the Political Parties Special Register. The figure is dynamic and this week it will hit 250. Of these formations, just a few are highly interested in how financial and accounting records should be kept, in how those records must be presented to the control authority. (...) The parties with a more substantial presence on the political stage were those to put more effort into briefing themselves on how law-compliant financing is done," said the AEP president.
Manager of the project Octavian Chesaru explained that an IT tool was developed to create, upload and submit the reports the law requires political formations and electoral competitors to refer to the AEP for it to look into their financing and electoral campaigns.
According to AEP, this project also developed an IT tool that facilitates the continuous training of the members of electoral bureaus and offices, of their auxiliary technical staff, electoral experts, computer operators and others who will perform the respective tasks.
A computer system was also developed to assess the performances of the members of electoral bureaus and offices, electoral experts, as well as computer operators.
Information sessions were organized with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and diplomatic missions abroad for diaspora communities, in the capital cities where the largest numbers of voters were recorded in the previous elections. These information sessions will continue and develop.
Another important element of the project envisaged the improvement of corruption prevention and combating competencies of AEP personnel, by organizing professional training courses on ethics, integrity and the prevention of corruption.
The project "DIGI-EMB - Digitization for increasing ethics transparency and integrity of electoral management and political parties and electoral campaign financing" is co-financed by the European Social Fund, and is carried out under the Operational Program Administrative Capacity.
