The Valencian Antifraud Agency recommends to the Valencia City Council improvements in the participatory process “DecidimVLC”
Valencia, September 18, 2020.- The Valencian Anti-Fraud Agency has sent the Valencia City Council a recommendation that compiles a set of proposals and good practices to improve the citizen participation process known as “DecidimVLC”.
The recommendation, which is not binding, was motivated by an anonymous complaint through the complaint mailbox in which it was alerted of a possible fraud in the citizen participation procedure for the elaboration of the participatory budgets through which they are decided some investments for the city of Valencia.
Although the AVAF has not observed fraud or corruption in the situation described in the complaint, it has activated a procedure to detect and verify possible aspects susceptible to improvement or good practices, with full respect for local autonomy and without prejudging any irregular actions.
Once certain aspects of the project have been contrasted with the Valencia City Council, the Director of the AVAF formulates a set of recommendations with the purpose of improving transparency and citizen participation in the procedure for preparing the municipal budget (“DecidimVLC”).
The AVAF recommendation includes up to 10 prevention mechanisms that in practice involve implementing a culture of ethics and public integrity.
Among the proposed mechanisms are:
• The need to justify the discrepancies between the amount assigned to this process and the one that appears in the municipal budget.
• Provide a permanent link visible from the City Council website to maximize citizen participation.
• Intensify the publicity campaign about the process.
• Use spaces for face-to-face or telematic deliberation.
• Publish the results of the participatory process and the monitoring of its execution in an open and reusable format.
• Consider in the design and monitoring of the process the proportionality between the number of votes necessary for the selection of investment projects to be executed and the increase in the percentage of effective citizen participation.
• Properly plan the temporal extension of the feasibility analysis phase and increase pedagogical work.
• Include in the regulatory bases of the participatory process some mechanism (such as, for example, responsible declarations, with updating commitments) that allows the detection and subsequent control of the possible existence of conflicts of interest.
• Plan the process of citizen participation in municipal budgets in an integrated / coordinated manner with the planning of the rest of the organization’s areas.
• Enable for future participatory processes a specific channel for complaints or complaints from citizens when they detect any dysfunction in the process.
From the outset, the Valencia City Council has received and valued the recommendation made by the AVAF and has accepted to assess the incorporation of the bulk of the recommendations proposed in the successive participation processes.
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Fecha de publicación: 18/09/2020