Only 10 municipalities in the country have published civil budgets. The municipalities fulfil a modest 27% of the indicators included in the sub-domain of financial transparency, they do not publish data on the salaries of officials and fees of the members of the municipal councils. These are just some of the results of the research for the Openness Index, that will be published tomorrow by the Foundation for Internet and Society Metamorphosis, as part of the project of USAID for civic participation, reports META.
The results indicate that the municipalities apply low standards for consultations, transparency, monitoring and control of their work. Also, there are big differences in the openness between municipalities, especially between the Planning Regions –the Southeast Planning Region has average openness of 34% while the Polog Region – 19%.
“The access to and the visibility of all financial information: budgets, annual financial statements and the public procurements are a legal obligation for the municipalities and the public enterprises. The planning and the spending of public finances in a transparent manner is a commitment of a part of the municipalities. Also, there are good practices of publishing information in an appropriate format that is available and comprehensible for the citizens as well as the inclusion of the citizens in the process of setting priorities for financial planning,” says the Metamorphosis Foundation.
An evaluation is made in the research of the state of good governance in the units of local self-government (LSG) in the Republic of North Macedonia for 2021. The research of the municipalities was carried out between June 1 and July 15, 2021 and included all 80 LSGs and the City of Skopje. The municipalities were evaluated through more than 139 indicators, divided into 4 areas and 9 sub-areas. Additionally, the formats of all published documents on the websites of the municipalities were checked, through the horizontal area open data.
The full results and the report on the evaluation of the state of good governance of the municipalities in the country for 2021 will be available tomorrow on the website of the Metamorphosis Foundation. The Measuring of the Transparency Index is performed annually, since 2016 through the ACTION SEE network.
Source: МЕТА
