Steven N.
The government has postponed completing the anti-corruption measures it had committed to undertaking despite the fact that they weren’t all that ambitious in the first place, writes watchdog NGO K-Monitor. Just three days before Christmas, a number of deadlines in the government’s national anti-corruption strategy were extended without announcement.
On December 22, the deadlines for most of the measures intended for 2020-2022 were postponed to 2023. This means that creating a database of positions prone to corruption and launching an automated system to reduce administrative involvement in making aid-related decisions will have to wait a few more years.
According to K-Monitor, no justifications need to be attached to government decisions, so the reasons for the delay are not known. And the news section on the government’s anti-corruption website has not been updated since July last year.
The government decided to adopt a medium-term anti-corruption strategy in 2020, consisting of analysis, evaluation, and training measures to combat corruption risks.
At the strategic level, reducing the influence of public procurement, increasing transparency, and requiring public servants to declare their assets were addressed between 2015-2018. While no major progress has been made in these areas, K-Monitor writes that a large amount of effort has been put into “increasing the transparency of civil organizations,” which stigmatizes NGOs who receive financial support from abroad. [Magyar Hang]
