On 12 and 13 July 2011 in Grand hotel “Radisson”, Sofia focus groups were discussing the standards of integrity in the conduct of public procurement. Representatives of the state administration, local authorities, NGOs and business took part in the debates. The participants had the opportunity to discuss the results from the performed sociological surveys devoted to the main problems in public procurement assignation and to the Integrity Pact evaluation.

 

The executive director of TI – Bulgaria Diana Kovatcheva made the participants familiar with the initiative’s goals, the experience of TI – Bulgaria by monitoring of conduct of public procurement as well as with the core characteristics of the Integrity Pact model which is being used by the International anti-corruption organization Transparency International and by many of its national representations.

 

A main topic of the discussion were the characteristics of a future Integrity Pact model and how it could be most effective in view of the specific national context in which the process of managing the fund spending is being fulfilled.

 

Along with associate professor Antoniy Galabov head of the sociology team of the project the participants in the experimental and focus groups gave their marks regarding the different approaches of implementing the Integrity Pact, the main structure, the functions of the participants in the project and the basic integrity indicators in fulfillment of public procurement.