Impact Evaluation. The case of the European project Woodie

3.1. What is the self assessment for?

The project Woodie intends to develop a ICT tool promoting an integrated approach to measure progress in preventing, detecting, prosecuting and sanctioning corruption and to assessign impact of corruption and of anti.corruption measures.
Since the elaboration phase, it was decided to focus the impact evaluation on the public sector and particularly on the area of public procurement. The choice depended on several factors: the economic relevance of the public procurement area, the high risk of corruption present in public procurement across Europe, the role of local authorities on the use of public funds, the impact of such corruption on communities and people’ life. Corruption in public works and infrastructure has the obvious potential for harm to the public interest, add substantially to the costs of public goods and services, leads to the misallocation of public resources, weakens policymaking and implementation, and destroys public confidence in the government.
The availability of better and more accessibile data and the establishment of an effective protection reporting mechanism able to protect whistleblower agaisnt retaliation are two main means to reach trasparency and integrity in public procurement.

Providing public authorities with an online tool to measure both the impact of WB and OD measures and the level of actual implementation can contribute to increasing the public sector capacity to prevent, detect and combat corruption.
The online self-assessment tool has been designed to help public authorities to:

• self-assess their level of awareness on their legislative framework on whistleblower protection and open data
• find out if they have the necessary system in place to fully implement obligations, achieve results and measure over time progresses on the implementation
• serve as a basis for knowledge improvements among internal key staff
• provide feedback on areas, mechanisms and procedures that need to be strengthened in order to improve the functioning and maximize the impact of the two measures towards employees, stakeholders and citizens.

The online tool is structured in two thematic sections, one dedicated to the whistleblowing protection and the other to the open data policy.

Each section is composed by two distinct self-evaluation questionnaires:

• the first part covers the legislative framework and it means to understand its aims, sectors of coverage, means of implementations, allocation of responsibilities and resources and other relevant features. This part is compiled at the first access and then it is expected to remain unchanged. However, it can be revised it in specific circumstances e.g. in case of adoption of a new law or of significant law amendments
• The second part focuses on how the measure (open data or whistleblowing protection) is implemented within the organization, the procedures and actions adopted and the results obtained. As this part is strongly linked to the day-to-day activities of the organization, it should be repeated periodically to check the improvements.  

It is available in all the six languages of the consortium plus English (Italian, English, Slovenian, Deutch, French, Romanian).