Finding the Money: Public Accountability and Service Efficiency through Fiscal Transparency

Finding the Money focuses on those areas of government most exposed to grand or petty corruption: budgeting, tax administration, public procurement, and management of government assets. The eight chapters collected in this volume are based on the assumption that corruption has systemic causes. By improving social accountability mechanisms and by increasing the institutional and human capacities of government, malfunctioning states and municipalities can be transformed. The anti-corruption techniques presented here go well beyond the introduction of political control mechanisms, expanding transparency, or revising the compact between the state and private service organizations to recommend the steps needed for fiscal transparency and good governance. Public sector integrity also depends on governments’ capacity to introduce these measures, the incentives to comply set by intergovernmental fiscal relations, the use of audit and the shortest route of accountability, i.e., its direct influence by customers on service providers. Finding the Money is a joint publication financed by the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative and the Center for Policy Studies at the Central European University. It is based on materials developed as part of a summer course at the Central European University in 2007 and commissioned by tiri–making integrity work in an effort to further fiscal transparency in the public sector through education and knowledge.