The chairman of the Court of Auditors has presented a study on 'conflict of interest management in the public sector' which concludes that half of the respondents said they did not even have codes or ethical conduct guidelines to follow.The president of the Council for Corruption Prevention, Vítor Caldeira, said that what’s needed is an "ethical adviser" within all public sector organisations that can act to prevent and manage conflicts of interest.
Caldeira said that among the organisations that have ethical conduct manuals, the vast majority fail to monitor what is going on.
The Council for Corruption Prevention (CPC) president said it is necessary to "do everything to make the culture of integrity in public administrations a reality.”
About 85% of the public entities that responded to the CPC questionnaire recognised that 'the management of conflicts of interest builds a culture of integrity,' as ‘very important’ with 68% stating that they have adopted the recommendation on conflicts of interest and 95% acknowledge that they are exposed to the risk of conflict of interest.
However, about half of the public bodies that bothered replying to the survey questionnaire "did not have ethical manuals and did not have adequate monitoring mechanisms," according to Vítor Caldeira.
The age-old mantra of ‘not enough staff’ to deal with conflict of interest management was the most mentioned difficulty cited by those public bodies that replied to the questionnaire.
As a result of this study, the CPC decided to include in its future activities a review and update of its 2012 recommendation on conflicts of interest, to promote the adoption of codes of ethics and conduct and to disseminate good practices with a view to promoting a culture of integrity in the Public Administration.
For this reason, and because "prevention is always better than cure", Vítor Caldeira defended the creation of an "ethical counsellor" in public bodies, "someone within the organisation who can awaken awareness, be a partner and spread good practices."
The Corruption Prevention Council was established in 2008 as an independent administrative entity that works with the Court of Auditors and aims to develop, under the terms of the law, national activity in the field of prevention of corruption and related offences.
The latest study was answered by a total of 468 public sector entities, which represent about half of the workers in public functions as at the end of 2017.
The failure of the 2012 recommendations about conflict of interests is due to the advisory nature of the Corruption Prevention Council which will continue to issue press releases about what needs to be done, rather than being in a position to insist on rules and procedures that could help to stamp out widespread conflict of interest issues, still prevalent in Portugal public sector.
