Valencia, April 5, 2023.- The president of the Societat Valenciana de Gestió Integral de Serveis d’Emergències (SIGSE), José María Ángel Batalla, and the director of the Valencian Anti-Fraud Agency, Joan Llinares, have signed a collaboration protocol between both institutions that will help promote the Integrity Plan in which the Emergency Service is working.
Within the general lines of the Integrity Plan, the implementation of complaint mailboxes, both internal and external, is contemplated, thus complying with the requirement of the new Law 2/2023 regulating the protection of people who report on regulatory infractions and the fight against corruption.
With this Law published in the BOE on February 21, the European Directive 1937/2019, on the protection of persons who report breaches of Union Law, better known as the Whistleblowers Directive, is transposed into Spanish law.
The SIGSE will enable as an external channel of denunciations the mailbox of denunciations of the Agency which will be visible on its website. This mailbox guarantees the confidentiality of whistleblowers as well as allowing the possibility of being able to make complaints anonymously.
The collaboration between both institutions will also extend to other actions and activities such as those of a training nature where emergency service personnel will receive training in aspects related to the promotion of ethics and public integrity, as well as the prevention and detection of situations constituting fraud and corruption.
The SGISE Integrity Plan will contain, among others, an institutional declaration of integrity; incorporating institutional integrity into strategic planning; enabling a specific internal whistleblowing channel and connecting to the Agency’s external whistleblowing channel; the regulation and management of conflicts of interest; the training of personnel in integrity or the promotion and dissemination of the culture of ethics and public integrity.
The president of SIGSE José María Ángel, stressed that “through this framework agreement the public company will intensify actions to apply the practices of transparency and good governance in the entity that manages the forest fire service”.
José María Ángel has shown his satisfaction after signing this agreement. “We will walk together in order to achieve a double objective. The first is to provide greater transparency to management, because that is a basic and inalienable principle in any activity related to public entities and bodies.” Secondly, he continued, “this agreement also guarantees greater access to citizen information to these entities and, as a consequence, we bring our management closer to society.”
For his part, the director of the Agency, Joan Llinares, hashighlighted “the importance of signing a collaboration protocol between the Agency and SIGSE, the entity responsible for extinguishing forest fires that will allow compliance with the new Law on the protection of persons reporting corruption and the consolidation of higher levels of ethics and public integrity”
Anselm Bodoque, head of the Training Service of the Valencian Anti-Fraud Agency, presented the public policies for the prevention of fraud and corruption, as well as the reason for being and functions of the AVAF. The culture of public integrity promoted by the AVAF and the prevention of risks in decision-making in the local administration was the subject addressed by Pilar Moreno, a technician from the Agency’s Training Service. In turn, Marita Oliver, an AVAF training technician, focused her speech on the basic aspects of the anti-corruption cycle.
