Fund for Transparent Slovakia will support 6 organisations in fight for better Slovakia

Evaluation Committee members were as follows:

• Michal Kišša (Nadácia Pontis)
• Eva Braxatorisová (program Attorneys Pro Bono)
• Stanislav Čekovský (Anasoft)
•  Martin Slosiarik (FOCUS)

Read more about the organisations that were successful in the grant call of Transparent Slovakia Fund 2019/2:

Institute for economic and social reforms (INEKO): Supporting independence and transparency of public institutions (16 000€)

The goal is to increase independence and transparency of regulatory, controlling and judicial institutions whose mission is to protect general public against abuse of power by politicians and interest groups. Independence evaluation will grow from 18 institutions currently to approximately 25. Based on the analysis and comparison of institutions as well as their representatives and other experts, recommendations and proposals for systemic changes will be compiled. In order to create public pressure, the outputs will be published on an online portal, in media, and they will be offered to political leaders. A part of the project will be the impartiality evaluation of selection process to leadership positions of chosen institutions, but also lectures for high-school students all over Slovakia.

Transparency International Slovensko: More transparency in functioning of the courts of law and public prosecutors (16 000 €)

Main goal of the project is to increase public oversight over functioning of courts of law and public prosecutors. In case of courts, ranking list of judges‘quality will be created and year over year changes will be compared, which will create pressure for their improvement. The role of family connections in judiciary branch will be analysed based on personnel selections from 2019 that are run in a new, supposedly, fairer manner. In case of public prosecution, official statistics regarding crime prosecution are published by Attorney’s General Office in a user-unfriendly PDF format and will be reworked into interactive open data source about this department. Overall, this will strengthen personal responsibility and transparency in key areas necessary for enforcing the rule of law.

• Slovensko.Digital: Red Flags 4.0 (15 000 €)

Informatisation of public administration is conducted through large national IT projects that are evaluated systematically by means of specialised Red Flags methodology. Current evaluation pool contains 58 projects, and activities until now contributed to better quality along with public administration savings. It is expected in next 2 years that the projects will go through public tenders and their implementation will begin. We are striving to achieve higher transparency through evaluation of project development as well as cooperation with key partners of public administration and IT sector. General public will be informed about the IT projects through media and website http://redflags.slovensko.digital.

Fair-Play Alliance: Narrower gray zone, better analyses – healthier public finances (9 000 €)

The project has an ambition to uncover weak areas of legislation that allow sophisticated speculative practices of companies thus leading to lower income of national budget or higher expenses. Thanks to extensive experience with the analysis of published financial statements and other public data, companies with atypical behaviour for their type of business will be identified. Using experience of former KPMG auditors (pro-bono consultations), assumptions of legislative weakness exploitation will be confirmed or refuted. Should the exploitation of legislative weakness be substantiated, the process will be detailed and a transparent solution will be proposed that would reduce space for tax evasion, corruption or other (not only) economical activity on the borderline of law. The proposal will be presented to the new government and published.

Slovak Governance Institute: Increase of public discourse quality and identification of falsehoods during and after electoral campaign (16 000 €)

The goal is enhancement of public awareness about facts and fiction in political discussions, which will contribute to democracy strengthening. Beside statements verification, database of Demagog.sk with 14000 statements will be utilised and it will be determined whether politicians are more prone to say untruths before or after elections. Also it will be established which topics are more often subject to misrepresentation and what are the most frequent argument fouls and so called „red-flags“ – suspicious argumentation techniques. Based on the research findings, there will educative publications and a campaign with emphasis on one of the most vulnerable groups to misinformation – students from regions under extremism threat. There will be trainings where they will receive aforementioned publications.

Slovak Debate Association: Youth debates about transparent Slovakia (8 000 €)

The project’s goal is bringing topics related to transparency of public life closer to young people. The first project phase aims to prepare texts and training materials for the young in order to get acquainted with the topic of transparency in their schools. Subsequently, debates will be organised where the students will discuss with their peers about topics such as demonstrating of assets origin, fight against corruption, whistle blowing, etc. In these sessions, they should not only get information about the subject, but also to understand the importance of transparency for healthy society. These sessions will be followed by Oxford-type debates where experts will discuss with the students and the public.

Supporting ethics and transparency

The mission of  Fund for Transparent Slovakia is advancement of ethical behaviour and transparency in Slovakia. These organisations and initiatives are important part of democracy strengthening, higher law enforceability and improvement of business environment necessary for economic development of the country.

We are thankful to the member companies for long-term partnership. We will keep informing you about results of supported organisations.