Only 10 municipalities in North Macedonia have published civil budgets, while the local self-government units are meeting only a modest 27% of the indicators in the sub-domain of financial transparency. The municipalities aren’t publishing data about salaries of officials and the salaries of the members of their councils.
This is just a small part of the results of the research that was carried out for the Openness Index, that will be published tomorrow by the Foundation for Internet and Society Metamorphosis, as part of the USAID’s project for civic participation.
The results show that the municipalities are implementing low standards for public consultations, transparency, monitoring and control of their operations. Also, there are big differences in the transparency between municipalities in the Planning Regions – the Southeast Planing Region has average transparency of 34% while the Polog Region only 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,” Metamorphosis Foundation said.
The research evaluated 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 took place between the 1st of June and the 15th of July 2021 and it covered all LSGs and the city of Skopje. The municipalities were evaluated by over 139 indicators, divided into 4 areas and 9 sub-areas. Apart from this, the formats of all published documents at municipalities’ webpages were checked, through the lateral check for open data.
The complete results and the report about the evaluation of the condition of the municipalities’ good governance in North Macedonia during 2021 will be available tomorrow on the Metamorphosis Foundation’s website. The Measuring of the Transparency Index is carried out annually, starting from 2016 through the ACTION SEE network.
